Sanford's bully pulpit creating few legislative converts

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For the maverick governor facing re-election next year and a short record of legislative accomplishments, that's standing operating procedure. As a rare incumbent who didn't emerge from the Legislature's confines, Sanford has made it a practice to reach out to an audience far broader than the 170 House and Senate members.

Wednesday, he got at least part of a loaf as the Senate passed its version of tort reform and returned it to the House, but Sanford also took on the House, publicly questioning the soundness of its budget bill.

The blitz covers several of Sanford's key bills again before the Legislature after failing to win approval in his first two sessions.

Ongoing tension

It also underscores the ongoing tension between Sanford and the Republican majority that controls the Legislature. Such tension can impact how much, if any, of Sanford's initiatives are enacted into law and in a form acceptable to him.

"He's created a real bad atmosphere between him and some members of the Republican Party," Sen. Ralph Anderson, D-Greenville, said of Sanford. Democrats, he said, are largely unaffected.

Sanford wasn't available for comment, but his spokesman, Will Folks, said relations with lawmakers weren't deteriorating, and the back-and-forth was "natural to the deliberative process."

Rep. Dan Cooper, R-Piedmont, said Sanford's relations with the House are better than with the Senate, but still not good.

"The House has worked hard to pass his agenda, yet he finds fault with most everything we do," Cooper said. "He doesn't accept anything less than what he wanted, and in politics it's hard to get everything you want in one piece."

On Monday, just days after veteran Sen. Verne Smith, R-Greer — to the delight of many of his colleagues — criticized Sanford in blunt terms on the Senate floor, the governor traveled the state trying to build grassroots pressure to pass his tort reform bill.

Horse and buggy

That was less than a week after he showed up for a Statehouse press conference in a horse and buggy to illustrate what he said is a 19th century government structure in dire need of the overhaul he has proposed.

Sanford also is appearing in television and radio ads sponsored by a group that supports his bill to give tax credits to parents for home schooling, private schools or a different public school.

The ad explaining the Sanford's school choice plan began airing Monday, financed by a conservative group, the Columbia-based South Carolina Policy Council. On March 2, the council released a study favorable to the legislation.

Ed McMullen, the group's president, said the council raised money over the past year for the commercials and has purchased $217,000 in airtime.

On Tuesday, a group called South Carolinians for Tort Reform, ran ads in Upstate newspapers targeting three senators who it alleged voted against Sanford's tort reform bill in committee last week. They are David Thomas, R-Fountain Inn; Glenn Reese, D-Spartanburg and John Hawkins, R-Spartanburg.

In a letter to the editor in The Greenville News, Sanford asked readers to contact the trio to "encourage them to stop holding up this critical reform." To make it easier, he included their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

After an amended bill was approved Wednesday, Folks called it "a step in the right direction." Although Folks didn't directly address whether the bill is acceptable to the governor, he said, "At the end of the day politics is the art of the possible and this will certainly help the economic development situation here in South Carolina."

Sanford challenges

Sanford challenged the House on Wednesday "to put the state's fiscal House in order" by limiting spending growth to the 3 percent he called for in his budget, not the 5.3 percent the House Ways and Means Committee adopted. The bill is set for debate next week.

House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, responded to Sanford's remarks, saying, "The House is in heated agreement with the governor on nearly everything."

Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, said his panel's budget "fully funds education. Unfortunately, the governor's did not."

Thomas said Sanford, while extremely personable, has sought since he took office "to pit himself against the General Assembly."

"If you appear to beat up the Legislature, then when you need the Legislature to pass things, you don't have a whole bunch of people to carry your water for you," Thomas said.

Dave Woodard, a Clemson University political scientist and Republican consultant, said, "People elected (Sanford) because they thought he could work with the Legislature, but this continued inability to get anything done is frustrating a lot of people."

Agenda stalled

In his third year in office, most of Sanford's legislative agenda is still in the Legislature, much of it passed by the House but mired in the Senate. Press releases aimed at the General Assembly as a whole miffed the House whose leaders said it has done its job.

Wilkins issued a terse statement after Sanford's "Statehouse event" with the carriage, urging Sanford "to roll up his sleeves and work diligently with the Senate to pass these important legislative initiatives already passed by the House."

Sanford is a former three-term congressman and real estate developer who prides himself on being a servant-leader who, unlike nearly all his predecessors, didn't cut his political teeth in the legislative culture.

No recent governor has so studiously warred with the Legislature the way Sanford has, Woodard said.

"We all just chalk it up to Sanford being Sanford," said Rep. Dan Tripp, R-Mauldin.

'Taxpayers' advocate'

Folks said Sanford is an advocate for the taxpayers, then expressed amazement "that some folks see an open and honest discussion of issues in the public arena as a bad thing."

Sanford isn't confrontational in dealing with the Legislature, Folks said, adding that with personalities coming into play, some individuals may be too thin-skinned.

"Why can't the governor go to bat for ideas he believes in passionately," Folks asked rhetorically.

Sanford has cultivated a maverick style, from carrying pigs into the Statehouse to a penchant for casual dress to often going against the political grain in pursuing a wide-ranging legislative agenda that is still a work in progress.

He may lack the legislative accomplishments of his recent predecessors, but Walter Edgar, University of South Carolina author-historian, said whatever antagonisms he may have used in dealing with lawmakers pale in comparison to some of the distant and recent past.

"Cole Blease frequently lectured the Legislature via veto messages, some of which were so profane that they offended the dignity of the House and were not printed in the journals," Edgar said.

Olin D. Johnston, a future senator, warred with the old Highway Department in the 1930s, at one point calling out the National Guard to surround the Highway Building and keep out commissioners he claimed to have fired, Edgar said.

'Difficult' approach

More recently, "Carroll Campbell had his fierce opponents in the Senate, including several Republicans. And remember that Campbell's first campaign was against the good old boy system."

Sanford's unorthodox approach, while not diminishing most members' respect for him, "make things a little more difficult," said Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens.

"There's been bad blood, (but) this public embarrassment is going to make them real hostile," Clemson's Woodard said of the horse-and-buggy incident. "He's real good at the stunts, but people are waiting for him to produce."

Martin questioned Sanford's timing for the horse-and-buggy ploy.

It came the day after an amended version of the governor's state government restructuring bill emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Maybe he ought to attach his horse to our buggy," Martin said.

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Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.