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Heartlessness Won't Help Republicans Win the White House

2 years ago

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Senior Correspondent

CHARLESTON, S.C. – Governors, even those who are strong partisans, usually like to describe themselves as pragmatic problem-solvers. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, a former congressman steeped in polarized House politics, never made the transition.

The second-term Republican's lonely fight to reject $700 million in recession help from the federal government officially ended Monday when, under orders from the state Supreme Court, he grudgingly applied for the money. Yet it's a loss that Sanford could spin into a victory, and then the real loser will be his party.

To recap: Sanford tried to decline the economic stimulus funds, intended for education and law enforcement. In a case that boiled down to a power struggle between two branches of state government, the court said the Legislature had allocated the money and Sanford had to apply for it. He told U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a letter Monday that he was signing the request for funds "under duress."

You could make the case that politically, Sanford has raised his profile and enhanced his career prospects. He is chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and he finishes the two terms he's allowed as governor in 2010. It's not far-fetched to imagine him trying for the presidency or the No. 2 slot in 2012.

Already he is a hero in some quarters for asking to use the $700 million to pay down state debt (the Obama administration said no) and condemning the entire $787 billion federal recovery package. "A monumentally terrible idea" that borrows from "future generations who have no say in the matter," he said in his letter to Duncan.

All that would certainly appeal to some conservative Republican primary voters, but how would it look to a broader national audience? Heartless is the word that comes to mind.

As the Charleston Post and Courier asked in an editorial Friday, "Who would have imagined that the governor would actually attempt to block his own state from getting badly needed recession aid?"

It's not as if South Carolina has a booming economy or an above-average school system. The state's jobless rate in April was 11.5 percent, the third highest in the nation. Its fourth- and eighth-graders rank 41^st and 42^nd in the nation on reading scores. In a study this week, Education Week says South Carolina has improved, more than any other state, its rate of high school students who graduate in four years – but still it ranks 37^th in the country.

Sanford has accepted three-quarters of his state's $2.8 billion share of the recovery package, which Congress passed to stimulate economic activity and cushion the pain of the recession. He's taken money for transportation, for energy conservation, for Social Security recipients. Yet he drew the line at education.

"I believe there will be less employment and opportunity as a result of the restructuring foregone and the spending incurred," he said in his letter to Duncan.

It's a puzzling point of view given the job losses and missed opportunities already affecting students as a result of the downturn. The impact on elementary and secondary education has included larger classes, cutbacks in summer school and after-school programs, and the disappearance of specialized courses as teachers leave and aren't replaced.

Districts across the state had planned to eliminate 1,500 teaching positions this fall according to Jim Foster, a spokesman for state education superintendent Jim Rex, an independently elected Democrat. Foster says the stimulus money means they'll only have to cut 1,000.

Joel Sawyer, a Sanford spokesman, says Sanford's resistance to the $700 million for education and law enforcement had to do with trying to reduce his state debt. "It was the only pot of money the governor had discretion over," Sawyer said. He said Sanford did not try to reject money for transportation, energy or other purposes because it is being routed through existing programs and there was no possibility of using it to pay down debt.

Analysts, journalists and politicians, among them Democratic state Sen.Yancey McGill, have noted that South Carolina's debt is small -- $494 per person, better than 37 other states -- and it's one of only nine states with a AAA bond rating from Moody's.

The explanation you hear more often from education advocates is that Sanford is no fan of public schools. Asked why the governor would try to reject education money, Foster replied, "Our governor's biggest initiative for public schools has been to push vouchers and tax credits that would make it easier for parents to leave them."

Indeed, this month in a conservative newsletter called School Reform News, Sanford seems to suggest that he'd use stimulus money for vouchers if he could. To improve educational outcomes, the newsletter quotes him as saying, "We need to be free to use those federal dollars on things like private and public choice."

Molly Spearman, executive director of the South Carolina Association of School Administrators, which brought one of the stimulus lawsuits against Sanford, says he is anti-government and wants to downsize it, including public education. "It did not pain him that we were losing teacher jobs in South Carolina," she says.

Yet many of Sanford's fellow Republicans were pained by the potential toll on prisons, courts and police as well as education. State Sen. Hugh Leatherman, chairman of the Finance Committee, told Sanford that rejecting the federal money would create "absolute chaos" in agencies that perform core missions and "hurt tens of thousands of South Carolina families at a time when uncertainty and fear over the economy already pervade almost every household."

Leatherman didn't see missed opportunities to "restructure" the government. He saw a state budget that already had been cut $1.1 billion in the past year and higher education that was being funded at 1995 levels – without adjusting for inflation.

Chip Felkel, a Republican consultant based in Columbia, says Sanford has governed as a rigid patrician instead of a responsible manager. "He's an ideologue, plain and simple," Felkel says. "He has spent too much time being right and not enough time getting something done."

Sanford isn't the only Republican governor to resist elements of federal stimulus spending. Some, including Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, have joined Sanford in declining unemployment benefits for part-time workers, saying their state plans don't include such workers now and they can't afford the expansion.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is trying to reject $28.6 million in money for energy projects such as weatherization to reduce heating costs. She's the only governor to do so – in freezing Alaska, no less -- and may ultimately be overridden by legislators, many of whom are her fellow Republicans.

While all four of these governors have national ambitions, Sanford is the only one who has tried to deprive his state of $700 million. His stand is certainly a bracing antidote to empathy, a trait much maligned these days in conservative circles.

But that's hardly the path to the White House, for Sanford or for his party.

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