There’s a parallel to 1998 governor’s race, but it’s not what you think

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Associate Editor

I LEARNED IN 1998 that I couldn’t predict what South Carolina voters are going to do. So I’m not going to repeat my mistake of saying there’s no way a little-known, uncharismatic state legislator can unseat the sitting Republican governor this fall.

Still, I must take issue with the pundits and politicos who look at how many votes Dr. Oscar Lovelace stole from Gov. Mark Sanford in Tuesday’s GOP primary and envision a November replay of David Beasley’s 1998 loss to Jim Hodges.

They’re overlooking a major difference between 1998 and 2006: Sen. Tommy Moore doesn’t have video poker to underwrite his campaign the way Mr. Hodges did. This time, Mr. Sanford has that advantage.

Not literally, of course. We outlawed video poker, and the poker barons are no longer a potent political force. But a new force is operating in the political realm very much as the poker barons did, and it threatens to take control of the Republican Party just as video gambling took control of the Democratic Party.

The video poker barons grew a multi-billion-dollar industry by ignoring our laws, manipulating our courts and bullying our Legislature into submission. When Mr. Beasley called them a “cancer” and vowed to shut them down, they plowed their money into a constant barrage of “independent” attacks on the governor and poured more of it into the suddenly flush Democratic Party coffers.

Today, the ironically named “South Carolinians for Responsible Government,” the emergent “Conservatives in Action” and who knows what other groups just spent who knows how much money from who knows where trying to take out Republican House members who don’t embrace their agenda of de-funding the public schools and throwing tax money at unaccountable, unregulated private schools.

They weren’t very successful in that goal. (Of course, the poker barons didn’t do a terribly good job taking out House members who opposed them in the 1998 primaries.) But their candidate for superintendent of education beat out a crowded field. And you can be sure that if Mr. Sanford needs any support in the fall, they’ll be happy to provide it. After all, it was his election as governor that gave them the foothold they needed to descend upon our state to begin with.

I’m not suggesting that vouchers and tuition tax credits are the moral equivalent of video poker; they’re not. Some honest people honestly believe that it makes sense to use public funds to pay for private schools.

The poker barons were more dangerous, in the sense that street crime is more dangerous than white-collar crime: The damage they inflicted on their victims was more immediately felt, but as long as legislators left them alone, they let our state’s leaders run the rest of the state as they saw fit. The voucher backers attack the lifeblood of our democracy: universal public education. And their fellow-travelers want to shrink government spending and shrink it and shrink it some more, so that in 25 years, as Grover Norquist so eloquently puts it, “we can get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But the similarities between the tactics of the video poker barons and the mysterious groups pushing vouchers and tax credits are deeply troubling.

Michigan-based All Children Matter was the first of these groups to emerge, when it backed voucher-backers in Republican primaries two years ago. Then, when people caught on to where that group was from and what it was all about, “South Carolinians for Responsible Government” took over as the face of the movement. And then, right in the middle of this year’s primary campaigns, the name “Conservatives in Action” suddenly replaced SCRG’s name on attack pieces — after the State Ethics Commission turned up the heat on SCRG.

The Ethics Commission told “South Carolinians for Responsible Government” it had to obey the state law that requires it to report how it spends money trying to influence our votes.

It declined.

It challenged the law in court.

It sent lobbyists to the State House to kill a bill that would have required it to report where that money comes from as well.

Sound familiar?

By the end, the poker barons had to be stopped less because of the damage their gambling empires were doing to our state (although that was considerable) than the way they were corrupting our political system.

SCRG, CIA and whatever meaningless acronym of a group might join the tag team next have pulled out the video poker playbook and are following it flawlessly: Ignore our laws. Intimidate our legislators. Run the clock in court. Use your considerable money — from whatever reputable or disreputable source it may come — to target your critics and bolster your allies.

That’s what Mr. Moore is going up against in the fall, and that’s what makes the pundits’ comparisons to 1998 so misplaced. That, and the fact that — unfortunately — his “save the schools from the barbarians” message isn’t nearly as big a vote-getter as Mr. Hodges’ deceptive “free money for the schools” message.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.