Sanford's call for change at critical juncture

e-mail this story Dan Hoover • 'Vindicated' Beasley dogged by protesters (04/04/04) • In spring, Dems' fancy lightly turns to 2006 (03/27/04) • Latest switch puts damper on Dems (03/21/04) • Sanford's call for change at critical juncture (03/07/04) • Political ties never seem to be permanent (02/28/04)

The Republican governor, operating with a GOP-controlled Legislature, is facing the prospect of going to the voters in 2006 with none of his top issues enacted.

In this legislative state, the young outsider with new ideas faces a legislative rank-and-file more enamored of the status quo than sweeping change.

"The clear mandate of our campaign to shake things up in Columbia" has again run into a change-resistant General Assembly, Sanford said last week.

Past history suggests that legislative dynamics and political self-interest among lawmakers mean a governor isn't likely to get in his third and fourth years what he didn't get in the first two.

Sanford campaigned on two signature issues: eliminating the state income tax and restructuring state government through enhanced centralized authority in the Governor's Office.

In his first crucial year as the first governor in 50 years who didn't come out of the Legislature, Sanford's focus was on what he calls a "learning curve" of getting to understand the legislative culture and players replaced building coalitions and forcefully pushing his campaign agenda.

Accordingly, the House rejected an income tax cut; later the Senate killed another version. Restructuring moved to this year.

Now Sanford's tax cut has clear sailing through the House, but faces intense opposition in the Senate from Democrats and some in the GOP majority.

Recently, he took the unprecedented step of going before the Senate Judiciary Committee to pitch his bill for constitutional amendments to let voters decide on whether most of the current elected statewide officials would become gubernatorial appointees.

Senators smiled, nodded, thanked Sanford. He left. They took out their knives and gutted the bill.

Part two of restructuring, with more budgetary and management implications, involves agency consolidation, largely among health care departments. That bill remains alive.

Politicians and political junkies tend to live in two worlds: the here and now and the next election.

From a practical politics standpoint, Sanford exists more, perhaps only, in the here and now. Next elections are for politicians, a title and lifestyle Sanford has shunned in favor of that of servant-leader.

He has emerged as a very different kind of governor.

Neither a head-knocker in the Carroll Campbell mold nor possessed of the smooth cajolery of Dick Riley, Sanford relies more on the power of ideas to carry the day, without gubernatorial head-butting, problematic with 170 legislators with their own interests to guard, real or imagined.

But neither Sanford nor his allies are writing off his potential legacy, and Rep. Lewis Vaughn, R-Taylors, finds Sanford "determined to get things done, but in his own way."

Contrast his emerging record with the same period for his four immediate predecessors, two Democrats and two Republicans, who got most of their campaign issues enacted early.

"I don't think it compares" to them, University of South Carolina political scientist Blease Graham said of Sanford's emerging record. "It may be style, it may be that the others were all (former) legislators whose colleagues knew them, knew what to expect and could deal with them."

Sanford expresses a degree of acceptance.

"In politics, as in life, you do what you can do. What people want to see is that you're trying, pushing hard, aggressively acting on the things you promised to act on. We're certainly doing that. At the end of the day, you can take the horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

What if his signature bills fail?

"That isn't something that comes back to haunt me in political circles, but has direct ramifications for people with a different viewpoint," Sanford said.

His style has raised some legislative hackles, even within his own party.

"New ideas are completely at odds" with a General Assembly that is "institutionally resistant to change," Sanford says of legislative critics.

"You talk about it for two years in a statewide race, you talk about it for a whole other year in office and then you sit down in a Judiciary hearing and someone says, 'First time I've ever heard of it.'"