Brad Warthen's Blog

Is McCain getting smeared in SC AGAIN?

One of the most shameful moments in recent South Carolina history was the anonymous smear campaign against John McCain conducted via phone "push polls" in 2000. It was particularly malicious, low and vile, spreading racist lies about an innocent child. Read this account to remind you:

    In South Carolina, Bush Republicans were facing an opponent who was popular for his straight talk and Vietnam war record. They knew that if McCain won in South Carolina, he would likely win the nomination. With few substantive differences between Bush and McCain, the campaign was bound to turn personal. The situation was ripe for a smear.

    It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

    Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.
    Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

That account was written in 2004 as a warning not to let it happen again. This morning, right after I got up to do a phone interview with C-SPAN about our endorsement of Sen. McCain, I saw this overnight e-mail from the McCain campaign:

    Tonight, volunteers making telephone calls for the McCain campaign report that some voters recently received negative information about Senator McCain. While we do not yet have conclusive proof, we are concerned that this may be the beginning of a smear campaign.

    If you receive any malicious messages, letters, phone calls, e-mails, fliers or any other form of "negative" information about John McCain, please contact our McCain Truth Hotline directly at 803.477.6987 or email us at [email protected] as quickly as possible. (Note: If the attack is made over the telephone, either by a caller or by a recorded message, please save the recording and take note of the CALLER ID phone number for use as evidence of these unethical and possibly illegal campaign tactics.)

    Thank you for helping protect Senator McCain from false attacks during these last days leading up to our January 19 Republican Primary.

I certainly hope that this is a case of the McCain folks overreacting out of their perfectly understandable sensitivity -- which is base in bitter experience. What happened in 2000 wasn't just a painful experience for one man and his family -- it's widely believed to have given the S.C. primary to Bush (which, if it did, is in itself a dark stain on the honor of S.C. voters). If that analysis is correct, those vicious whispers had a profound effect on U.S. history.

If it's starting to happen again, decent people all over our state should rise up to confront the lies, and repudiate the liars in the strongest terms. But is it starting to happen again? Have you received calls that fit this description.

Do you like the new look? What would make it better?

Hey, folks, I just updated the intro on the main page of my blog, as promised. That old Stephen Colbert video from October was getting moldy.

 

I tried to make it more useful to my readers, but I'm not the world's greatest Web designer. Suggestions for improvement are welcome, and may even be acted upon ...

What do you want this blog to be for the next three weeks?

You'll notice that today's column -- which I mistakenly backdated to yesterday morning rather than this morning, but have now corrected -- was an elaboration on a blog post. Watch for more of that; over the next three weeks -- between now and the Jan. 26 Democratic primary here -- I plan to write more columns than usual, and as often as not, the blog will be the place where the column ideas first take shape.

I also plan to post more than usual. I'm shoving as many of my other duties aside as possible to concentrate on covering (in my own way, which will differ from what you see in news) and writing about the primaries, both for the blog and the paper. (You would have seen more last night and this morning here, but my personal life has been rather full -- and joyful -- the last 26 hours or so.) I will not, of course, be as free as a reporter would -- I've got to jam in time for as many as five candidate interviews in preparation for endorsements on the 13th (Republican) and 20th (Democratic). But those interviews should produce a lot of fodder for this venue as well.

I want to make the most of all this effort, and make what I'm doing as useful as possible. I won't just be doing this to be busy; I've got granddaughters to rock, you know. So I'd like y'all's suggestions as to what you would like to see here. More video? More accessible format? More links to news and other opinions? More pictures of grandchildren (sorry, that just slipped out)? Think particularly in terms of what the editorial page editor of South Carolina's largest newspaper might contribute that you wouldn't get elsewhere; there's little use in my duplicating stuff you can get already.

One thing I want to get done this weekend is replace the Stephen Colbert video that's at the top of my main page (that guy's campaign just went nowhere) with some sort of quick-start daily briefing. Maybe links to latest news, latest posts of interest, latest issue-oriented posts, or something like that. Something that you would find useful and that's doable without my dropping everything else to spend my days coding.

Anyway, I'm looking for ideas, so please pitch them my way.

Am I the only one who remembers the time BEFORE Kenny's?

Today, we have a couple of letters, and our newsroom had a section-front story, that discuss what is to happen with the former Kenny's Auto Supply site in Five Points, behind Yesterday's.

And I find myself thinking, as I often do -- am I the only one who thinks of that property as where the Winn-Dixie used to be? I still think of Kenny's as the new thing. I'm like, way disoriented, as the young folks might say.

Or -- and this would be worse -- am I dreaming this? Did I never go there to buy my groceries, then walk with them all the back uphill on Blossom to the Honeycombs, which, come to think of it, also don't exist any more?

And if not, where was I really back in the fall of 1971? Somebody give me a reality check here...

Spam magnets

Here's an interesting phenomenon to ponder -- and perhaps some of you who understand the Web better than I do can explain why it happens.

One of the few good things about the fact that I now have my blog programmed to hold comments for my approval (I'd rather leave the spigot open, but I've been taught over and over that blog hooligans always take advantage of that) is that I can stop all the spam comments before they appear.

These things come in waves. For instance, I'll get six or seven in a row that all have "hotel" in the fake e-mail address, and ostensibly advertise deals for holidays at hotels in Zurich, London, Hong Kong, etc. The text will more often than not contain a generic-sounding message such as "Great site! I'll be back," or "Not doing much today; just sitting around." Like I'm interested.

But here's the thing that puzzles me: These messages keep getting posted on the same old posts, over and over. This one, headlined "Another try," is a real spam magnet -- even though, when I went to find a link to it, I had trouble finding it. Google didn't want to go directly to it, which suggests to me that it hasn't been accessed much by spammers or anyone else. So how come spam messages keep appearing on it? You'll note there are a bunch of spam messages on it from before I went to the current policy of approving them before they appear. (I'll go clean those later.) Is that it? Does the presence of spam attract other spam?

Note that the post is from September 2006, and yet I got a new piece of spam on it today. That's part of the modus operandi of spammers; I guess glomming onto on long-forgotten posts is a way of flying under the radar.

Here's another example: "Jim DeMint meeting," from August 2005. This one, old as it is, also received a slice of spam today, and also has a bunch of old spam clinging to its bottom like so many barnacles. Posts right next to it don't have this problem; the spam goes straight for this one.

Also, once again, Google would not take me straight to this one. But it took me to something interesting: This site, which seems to form a sort of nexus for spam and this particular post. Can anybody tell me what this is, and better yet, how to stop this whole problem from recurring?

Anyway, the whole thing is like something from science-fiction/fantasy. It's as thought these posts are interdimensional portals of the sort that Heinlein wrote about in this one, or the open ends of wormholes or something. Altogether weird.

Ultimate S.C. Blogroll (a work in progress)

UPDATE: Here is the current version of the spreadsheet mentioned below...

Determined to inject some sense and organization to my sorta, kinda list of S.C. blogs in the rail at right, which I have long labeled "Fun with links" because it was nice and vague, I put together the attached spreadsheets.

Basically, I was trying to separate wheat from chaff, and provide a true list of S.C. blogs, along with some kind of hierarchy of timeliness. So I went through my list of links to see who had posted most recently (only seven out of 33 had posted today), then -- to add some depth to that metric -- how many times they had posted in the past week. (Among true S.C. blogs, The Palmetto Scoop and The Shot/The Chaser ran away from the pack.)

What I was seeking to do was to put my links in some sort of order, and it seemed that the most useful order for my readers would be one that honored timeliness. That would put TPS and The Chaser at the top, and "I Don't Believe The State" at the very bottom (no posts since June 21; I had already purged all blogs less fresh than that).

But wait: Those stats don't stack up to Andrew Sullivan's or Dave Barry's. But they lose points because they're not S.C. blogs, which is the point. Then, there are links to things that aren't blogs at all, but which I wanted to keep, such as to SC Hotline and Peggy Noonan's columns. (Earlier, I had created a new category called "Resources," and maybe SC Hotline belongs there. While I'm at it, I might create a list of links to recent work of top columnists, with a separate heading, as a home for Peggy.)

Finally, I decided I would afford extra points in my hierarchy to blogs that are written by a single person (as opposed to South Carolina '08) and are not anonymous (which would downgrade "not very bright," despites its timeliness).

Anyway, do me a favor, if you've got the time -- go over the spreadsheet, and give me feedback to improve it. The kind of feedback I'm looking for would include:

• Names of blogs that should make the list, but aren't here (plus all the relevant info you can provide). I'm guessing some might wish to advocate for FITS News, and others I'm just not thinking of. Speaking of Will, perhaps I should add a "taste" scale to my spreadsheet.)
• Identities of authors where I've got them wrong, or have wrongly judged them to be anonymous or pseudonymous. For instance, there might be someone who doesn't give his name, but wouldn't mind if asked. I am NOT seeking to expose private citizens who wish to be unknown, despite what some think.
• Whether you think a given site qualifies as a South Carolina blog. On the sheet I put together, I just said Y or N on that, but it occurs to me that I should have a scale on that score. There are some blogs based in SC that have nothing to say that you can't find on any other blog in the nation -- that is to say, they just watch cable TV news and parrot their particular sides party line on the subject. Such blogs are worth next to nothing. In fact, I'm going to go in and assign a 1-10 scale as to S.C. relevance, and save a separate version of the spreadsheet, here. Tell me if you agree/disagree with the ratings.
• Finally, is it a blog at all? Some, such as John Wrisley's, I'm not at all sure fit the category.
• Any other points I'm forgetting.

Your help will be appreciated.

Can you believe it?

Someone at Campaigns & Elections magazine interviewed me awhile back about my blog. You can see the result of that here.

Anything about that page jump out at you? What jumped out at me was Will's claim that FITS News gets an average of 5,000 to 7,000 page views a day. Either that, or his preferred estimate of "eleventy kabillion."

What do y'all think? Maybe it's possible, since he does a pretty fair job of keeping it current, and works hard at breaking news -- which I have a newspaper to do for me, relieving me of that burden. I think of my blog as supplemental, not the main course.

But I'm sort of thinking that Will didn't do what I did, which was to err on the conservative side. I said 1,000 a day. But I just went and checked, and for the last six months, it's been more than 1,200 a day average. That is, if I did the spreadsheet calculation right. I sort of think I didn't; that seems high to me. I know some of y'all are better at Excel than I am, so here are my current stats from Typepad -- you do the math.

I asked Theodora Blanchfield if she had any substantiation for Will's numbers. She said:

As I said in the intro, we just asked all the bloggers for their hits and qualified that, therefore, they should be taken with a grain of salt.

Fortunately, I have low blood pressure, so I can use all the salt I want.

A racial Rorschach test

Help me with a little experiment. Go watch this video footage of the mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton, giving his victory speech upon being elected to an unprecedented fifth term.

For added data, here's an editorial about his speech in The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper he mentions. Here also is a story showing how the vote broke down along racial lines, and here's an item about election night from an alternative paper.

What I'm wondering is: Based on this speech, what is your impression of the city of Memphis, and of its mayor?

My Sunday column is a sort of funky one, as it gropes around the problem of the dramatically different ways that black and white Americans see things around them. It's a question I've been pondering anew ever since the Jena Six thing hit the headlines -- I was struck by all the well-meaning black folks who were willing to suspend their lives to go march in behalf of some kids who, basically beat up another kid. Yeah, it looked like the justice system overreacted, but how could a person looking at it from afar see such moral clarity in a situation in which I saw no heroes.

This case from Memphis seems another illustration.

If you can, get someone who is not of the same skin color as you to look at the same stuff I'm asking you to look at. I'm guessing that would mean recruiting a black friend, since I have this image -- which is in itself probably an unjustified racial assumption -- of most of y'all as being way white. If I'm wrong about that, forgive me.

Anyway, please share your thoughts.

Let's talk trucks

Enough with the politics. Let's talk about something important.

One of my pen-pals I quoted on this post said,

You seem like a nice man Brad-- but you need an education in real people.  Put down your latte, your copy of the NYT, and park your Saab.  Now take a walk somewhere around real people, the real other side of America.

Well, I drink my coffee black, and I don't drive a Saab. In fact, I need me a truck. I need a truck on account of what happened to me last year. See the above photo. My '89 Ford Ranger was tooling along up I-77, just short of the Forest Drive exit, when all of a sudden it caught fire for no good reason.

This happened to me because I was doing a bad thing: I was on my way to play golf during the working day. I had never done this before. I have certainly never done it since. All of a sudden, a mile or so short of the exit mentioned before, I lost power -- the truck just couldn't mount the hill. Smoke starting billowing from under the hood.

I stupidly assumed the smoke was steam, and that it signaled a busted hose. But it was smoke. After I pulled over, I made a couple of phone calls to let folks know I would be late for the golf game (which in truth was in a good cause -- a golf game with Executive Editor Mark Lett and me had been auctioned off for United Way, and surprise of surprises, a couple of people had actually paid for the experience), and to get a tow truck on the way.

Anyway, after I'd made the calls, I noticed the "steam" was still pouring from under the hood. So I got out, and opened it -- there was a fire around one of my spark plugs, bigger than the flame from a candle, but smaller than a flaming breadbox.

So I did what anyone would do -- I blew it out. And it worked. Then I poured a bottled water on it. That meant I would be quite thirsty as I waited for the next two hours. You can see in the photo at right where a portion of the actual engine block burned away around the plug. Ugly.

Anyway, I've been making do with a sedan that I'm about to turn over to my wife, and seeing as how we don't have a subway system around here (which we should, but nobody listens to me on this), I need transportation, which means I need a nice, small, used pickup.

So I'm looking at two, and I'd like your advice. I think I've made up my mind, but I haven't quite, so your advice might be helpful. I'm going to buy one of the following (both advertised in The State by their owners):

• A 1999 Toyota Tacoma, single-owner, "lady-driven" (I loved that detail), 175,000 miles, but in beautiful condition -- not so much as a speck of rust on the undercarriage. Being sold from a parking lot of a Food Lion; the owner's ex-husband meets me there for tire-kicking and test-driving. No toolbox or hardcover over the bed, but a plastic bedliner $5,995
• A 2002 Ford Ranger, second-owner (current owner has a Carfax report from first owner), 74,000 miles. Owned by a state official (I didn't figure out who he was until after my second test drive, which was embarrassing, because he has an important job). Beautiful paint job. Hard cover over the bed, which I don't need, but could use or remove as I saw fit. $5899

I test-drove the Ranger first, and felt like I had a little trouble getting it into first and second gear smoothly. I didn't know whether that was the truck or me, as my last truck (unfortunately) had automatic transmission, and it had been seven years since I had driven a stick regularly. (Both trucks are 4-cylinder manual, 5-speeds, which is what I'm looking for, seeking the best possible gas mileage.) Other than that, it seemed fine, although I'm used to an extended cab and bucket seats, and this had neither.

The Toyota seemed to shift more smoothly for me from the start, reinforcing my impression that the Japanese are better at trannies than Americans or Germans (my wife's 1982 Mazda GLC shifted much better than the '78 Rabbit I was driving at the same time). But I keep worrying about the mileage. Yeah, I know you can give a Toyota at least 100k over most American cars, but that's still a lot of driving during which something that is thus far undetected could go wrong.

I went back and drove the Ranger again, and guess what? It shifted beautifully, so it was just me the first time (I think). Also -- I took it on the highway, and it stayed smooth in fifth gear. The one place where the Toyota was NOT smooth was over 60 mph ("lady-driven," and the lady never went over 55, I'm told), when it developed a very noticeable shimmy -- you can see the steering wheel shaking.

The Toyota's passed the ultimate test -- my mechanic looked at it a couple of days ago, and pronounced it good. I'm about to leave the office to go pick up the Ranger and take it to the mechanic. Assuming it passes, too, I think I've made up my mind.

But I want to know -- what would you do?

Why do YOU like Fred?

Since I was on the subject, I thought I would write my Sunday column on an aspect of the Fred Thompson phenomenon. I talked to Larry Grooms, who was sort of the spokesman for the S.C.-pols-for-Thompson thing yesterday. I'm trying to get ahold of a couple of others to ask them the same question.

You may have seen the Grooms quote in news reports, regarding the GOP field:

"They're all good guys, but there's something lacking in every one of them. I think Fred Thompson is the type of candidate that many people in this state are looking for."

What I asked him today was what it was what it was that Thompson had that was "lacking" in the other candidates.

Specifically, I asked what Thompson had that John McCain didn't have, since Grooms supported McCain in 2000. He didn't really want to talk about his problems with McCain, but he did talk about the Thompson mystique a little bit.

More on that in my column Sunday.

But in the meantime -- the idea of a Thompson candidacy has met a fairly warm reception in this venue. So tell me: What do you think Thompson has that the others don't?