The Governor Is Trying That Triangulation Thing Again

CLINTONIAN “STRATEGERY” PITS HOUSE VERSUS SENATE

FITSNews – March 6, 2008 – Let’s be honest … watching a fight between the S.C. House of Representatives and the S.C. Senate is like watching a crying baby mudwrestling a retarded midget. Expect a lot of whining, kicking, biting and crying, just don’t expect much in the way of progress or real reform. 

Neither “Republican-controlled” chamber is even remotely Republican, although as we predicted earlier this year, both bodies are going out of their way to appear that way to the voters in anticipation of upcoming elections.

Needless to say, public enemy No. 1 under the State House dome is Gov. Mark Sanford, whose mercurial persona, affinity for press clippings and maverick brand of fiscal conservatism has endeared him to the public, but effectively neutered his legislative agenda. Yet despite the mutual contempt both chambers feel for Sanford, they’re not beneath using him to score points against one another in their longstanding chamber-to-chamber spitball fight.

Of course Sanford’s desperation to score something – anything – resembling a major legislative victory often makes him a pawn in the game, as one body will pass a “Sanford priority” knowing that hell will freeze over before the other chamber passes it. Such is the government restructuring bill passed by the House this week, which would enable future governors to run on a ticket with the Lieutenant Governor, as well as appoint the Superintendent of Education and Secretary of State.

Even though the House bill doesn’t address our state’s real restructuring problem - the fact that we have a wasteful, legislatively-dominated board that basically steps all over the executive branch’s responsibilities - it does at least get the ball rolling on an incredibly important topic. Specifically, it’s the first step in a larger effort to upgrade our state’s 1895 government structure to meet the demands of a global, web-based world.

Of course, the proposal doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of making it out of the State Senate, where you can count the number of gubernatorial allies on one hand. And where it’s pretty much still 1895, as far as we can tell.

But in keeping with his longtime legislative approach, Sanford is once again attempting to triangulate – i.e. using the Bill Clinton strategy of aligning with one chamber in an effort to shame the other chamber into taking action.

The only problem with that strategy is that Clinton’s interpolitical skills were the stuff of legend, whereas Sanford’s continue to show a basic inability to “situationally compromise.”

What do we mean by that term? Well, the governor has a tendency to “over-compromise” on big ticket items (like his repeated cigarette/income tax tradeoffs) while remaining stridently inflexible on smaller, less important legislative positions.

Or it could be that the governor just doesn’t understand what “triangulation” means, as evidenced by a speech he gave his first year in office at the groundbreaking of a collaborative BMW-Clemson automotive research park.

In attempting – and we stress the word “attempting” – to compare the many participants in the research park to the way a global positioning satellite uses triangulation to locate something, Sanford got a bit lost on the road to making the analogy.

As a confused audience looked on, Sanford spoke about how the research park came together because “Clemson threw in a triangle, BMW threw in a triangle, (S.C.’s Department of) Commerce threw in a triangle, our office threw in a triangle …” etc.

Yeah. By the time the governor had finished his speech, there was hardly anyone in attendance who handn’t “thrown in a triangle.”

Anyway, we’d join the governor in commending the S.C. House for moving this restructuring bill forward, but we’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that a half-victory (from just one half of the General Assembly, no less) is probably all the governor is going to get here.

Which is too bad …