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Article published: Jun 12, 2005
Sanford odd man out in Lowcountry triumvirate

With the conclusion of this year’s legislative session in Columbia, there are a couple of developments worth mentioning:

1. The state’s power base now resides in the Lowcountry, namely Charleston, and

2. Gov. Mark Sanford’s relationship with the Legislature remains dismal.

On the first observation, we note that the new speaker of the House — succeeding Greenville Republican David Wilkins who has become the new U.S. Ambassador to Canada — is Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, formerly the House majority leader and chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He joins Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, also a Republican from Charleston, as the top leaders in both houses of the Legislature. The axis of power is no longer in the Upstate, in Greenville and Spartanburg, but in the Lowcountry.

As for Sanford, a Republican and a Charleston County resident when not occupying the Governor’s Mansion, he may be from the Lowcountry but he’s the odd man out in the current triumvirate because of his fractious relationship with the Legislature.

That leads further into the second observation. Sanford’s initiatives continue to run afoul of the Legislature. Last year he infuriated legislators with a massive number of vetoes, most of which were overridden. History repeated during this year’s session when the lawmakers overrode some 90 percent of his vetoes.

One of those vetoes came at the 11th hour Tuesday, striking down a bill creating a Francis Marion Trail Commission and alienating Sen. Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. The commission’s purpose would be to establish a trail for the Pee Dee region that was viewed as a major economic development project that could bring tourism to lower Florence, lower Marion, Williamsburg and Berkeley counties. It would be the first of its kind in the region. Even more puzzling about the veto was that there was no money involved. All it did was create a commission that could receive public and private funds.

A livid Leatherman told the Florence Morning News, “I really hope that our people understand who their friends are and who their friends aren’t. I really hope that they will remember this in the general election in 2006. Here we are, trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and it seems like we get kicked down by the governor every time we make a step forward.”

Sanford’s “my way or the highway” style in dealing with the Legislature may win points with the public but as Greenville-based consultant Chip Felkel, who has worked in GOP politics and public affairs for the past 20 years, noted in an op-ed piece that appeared in The State newspaper this week: “What we have here is a governor with a failure to communicate … He was hired by the voters to get things done, and while there have been moderate successes, the defeats have led to casting blame on the members of the House and Senate. Deflecting accountability may garner praise for him from national publications and help with the fund-raising, but it’s not moving the Sanford agenda forward ... Making the members of the General Assembly the bad guys may help with re-election. It plays well with the largely uninterested and disengaged public. But it is a huge mistake to communicate only from the bully pulpit.”

Even the bully pulpit is wearing thin for Sanford. This week he grudgingly allowed the seat belt safety bill to become law by withholding his veto. Then he released this condescending statement: “Based on the overwhelming level of support from the General Assembly, I will not impede what appears (our italics) to be the citizenry’s will.”

Given the governor’s overzealous use of vetoes and his inability to establish working relationships with legislators in order to lead to the give-and-take that is so effective in the political sphere, he is left with only his self-proclaimed role as an outsider and an agent of change.

The only problem is, he can’t effect change without the support of the Legislature. And that support has just about dissipated, which makes him an outsider who can’t seem to figure out how to govern.