It's the one that created a stir at the State House earlier this year, allegedly written by former Sanford spokesman Will Folks, which lists the lawmakers who should be taken out in order to create "a more conservative Republican majority" to implement Mr. Sanford's ideas, along with the strategy for accomplishing that. On a hunch, I picked it up and started thumbing through it.
It's so filled with over-the-top, cloak-and-dagger nonsense that if I didn't know better, I'd think it was parody, composed by a clever writer who planned to let it "leak," and then sit back and laugh at all the gullible media types and lawmakers who took it seriously. But I knew it wasn't parody, because I had just seen it being implemented.
Central to the strategy, the memo said, was to "create a unifying platform" for favored challengers to sign -- "Call it a 'Contract With South Carolina,' a "South Carolina Contract for Competitiveness,' call it whatever". It would include "a spending cap, an overhaul of the tax code and government restructuring."
The memo suggests the creation of a "Core Council" that would coordinate the campaign (working in secret so nobody knew it was coordinated, and thus subject to those pesky campaign disclosure laws that Mr. Sanford championed but his best allies have no intention of obeying).
...
The memo doesn't say who's bankrolling the hit campaign, but we know who has been pouring money into the Sanford agenda: the anti-government folks from New York and other parts outside our state whose first goal is to undermine public support for the most expensive thing state government does, by paying parents to abandon the public schools.
As Scoppe describes the memo, it sounds like a template that could be applied to any state.
Scoppe writes that she and her colleagues have supported a "government restructuring" initiative for years, but the presence of this memo puts her and other in "the Mark Sanford dilemma."
My colleagues and I have been pushing him for years to put some political muscle into government restructuring, rather than reserving it all for income tax cuts and vouchers. Now, it appears that he's doing just that. And I so want to believe that he is. But can anybody trust him and his support groups, particularly given who's writing the checks?
Consider their past -- and their present.
We're now in the middle of the third Republican primary cycle that is marked by big-bucks campaigns aimed at defeating legislators who oppose private-school vouchers and tax credits. Each time, you were hard-pressed to find any mention of vouchers or tax credits in the reams of attack post cards and radio spots. Simple reason: The voucher backers know they're not popular in South Carolina -- not even in Republican primaries.
So they attack on other grounds, usually making misleading charges and occasionally even fabricating them. They say their targets want to raise the gas tax based on a survey they filled out a decade ago, claim they voted for spending bills that they actually opposed, focus on state judicial elections that they hope voters will confuse with the liberal-conservative fights in Washington that haven't occurred here.
In short, SCRG and Conservatives in Action and other pro-Sanford groups whose funding has been traced back to New York libertarian Howie Rich (scbarbecue.blogspot.com) have a record of building their campaigns around populist Trojan horses to hide their real agenda and suck in ordinary voters who don't live and breathe this stuff.
"Be careful what you ask for; you might get a Trojan horse," State, The (Columbia, SC) - June 4, 2008
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