Fliers may have come from Howard Rich

In early May, back in South Carolina, fliers began to appear in mailboxes of voters in the Upstate, the northwest corner of the state. The fliers promoted a slate of candidates it called "tax-cutting conservatives," but the Spartanburg Herald-Journal reported that the issues listed on the fliers "are a veil to cover the group's real agenda, school choice." One of the candidates being promoted by the fliers was Joey Millwood, the young man running against veteran lawmaker Bob Walker.

South Carolinians for Responsible Government has sent mailings in support of Republican candidates Roger Nutt, an engineer facing incumbent Rep. Keith Kelly, and Joey Millwood , a journalist facing incumbent Rep. Bob Walker in June. The group has also sent out a flier supporting Ken Roach, who is running against fellow Republican and retired gas company executive Mike Forrester to challenge incumbent Democrat Ronnie Hart in November.

The candidates supported by South Carolinians for Responsible Government say that group issued its support without their knowledge, but they welcome it. The Responsible Government group's leaders say their organization is being pigeonholed as a single-issue advocate. S.C. law does not require so-called political awareness groups to disclose their donors, so it is unclear who is funding these mailings.

One of the fliers was illustrated with a "cartoon pig" and the other one showed a "a chubby, cigar-smoking man in a suit and tie." Neither Roger Nutt nor Joey Millwood claimed credit for the fliers.

Nutt and Millwood said the first time they saw the fliers was after they were mailed out. Both men have retained the services of consultant Chad Connelly, a board member of South Carolinians for Responsible Government.

But someone else concluded that the fliers were part of a strategy, the Herald said.

Political consultant Wesley Donahue called the fliers a diversion from South Carolinians for Responsible Government's true agenda - putting legislators in Columbia who support school choice. Donahue's client list includes Kelly, Forrester, and state Rep. Scott Talley, who is seeking a Senate seat against Lee Bright and L.B. Watson.

"Look at those mail pieces, and you will know which legislators stand with South Carolina public schools," Donahue said. "Bob Walker, Keith Kelly, Mike Forrester - these are people that stand with Spartanburg County public schools. It's these Ken Roaches and Roger Nutts of the world that have sold their soul to the voucher crowd."

"These guys are being back-funded, and recruited by these out-of-state millionaires who want to experiment on our public schools," Donahue said. "They should have to disclose. Everybody else does. That's what's so dirty about this whole thing."
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Millwood has said that he would not support vouchers but would consider tax credits for parents who opt to send their children to a nonpublic school.
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"School choice itself is a tenet of the Republican Party. So, the concept that parents are given a choice as to how their children are educated is something I would stand behind. The voucher idea, I'm not for. But I would entertain looking at the tax credits," Nutt said.

And the Herald itself identified who might be funding the group in South Carolina, and its fliers.

South Carolinians for Responsible Government has been tied to New York millionaire Howard Rich, who has supported a number of Republican candidates in this state through a variety of organizations and like-minded associates.

In 2006, South Carolinians for Responsible Government sued the State Ethics Commission after its director said it was trying to influence an election and had to disclose financial information. The state Attorney General's Office refused to provide the ethics commission with attorneys, and the case was eventually dismissed.

A bill this year that would have required political awareness organizations to disclose their financial information went nowhere. Neil Mellen, spokesman for South Carolinians for Responsible Government, called forcing a private, membership-supported group to disclose its financial information "ridiculous."

"Group mails fliers on candidates," Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC) - May 15, 2008

Editor cites need for campaign reforms

On the date that the Republican Party candidates forum article ran in the Herald-Journal, editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wrote about campaign finance reform in the capital city's newspaper, The State. Her theme was missed opportunities in previous reform proposals.

THE LAST time the Legislature "reformed" our campaign finance law, a lot of good changes were supposed to have been passed, to make it easier for voters to figure out to whom their elected officials might be indebting themselves. As the years went by, though, it became clear that the changes that got talked about the most didn't quite get made. And some of the not-so-good changes didn't get talked about very much. And of course, a whole slew of changes that needed to be made weren't -- but we've known that all along.

In this year's session, she wrote, another few proposals had been offered, and she liked one of them, a ban on "leadership PACs."

But another proposal was a bad idea, she wrote.

The Senate also addressed another "oops" event from the 2003 law -- a provision that was supposed to require candidates to tell us the occupations of their donors, just as candidates already have to do in federal elections. This was one of legislators' big bragging points after the 2003 reform. But this turned out to be an even bigger farce than the special-interest reporting law: While the law requires candidates to collect the information, they aren't required to report it to the public.

That would seem a simple enough problem, whose solution was painfully obvious: Change the law, to require candidates to report the information they collected. Somehow, though, that solution hasn't occurred to anyone at the State House.

Legislators' idea of a solution -- first proposed a few years back by a special House panel tasked with closing loopholes in the law -- is to remove the requirement that the information even be collected. Really.

Requiring candidates to tell us the occupations of their donors makes it easier for voters to see whether their senator is receiving an inordinate amount of support from, say, individuals who are employed by the payday lending industry. Every candidate for federal office manages to do it with no difficulty. And, assuming they've been obeying the law, S.C. candidates have been collecting the information for five years.

The other reform that hasn't seen the light of day is the bill to make it impossible for the likes of Howie Rich to use paper corporations to get around our donation limits. But we take what we can get in South Carolina, and if the House would join the Senate and ban leadership PACs, that would be a significant step forward.

"A chance to break out of one step forward, one step back mode"
State, The (Columbia, SC) - May 13, 2008

Newspaper explains challenger's agenda

By the filing deadline at noon on March 30, Joey Millwood had confirmed his intentions to run for the State House against his incumbent representative, Bob Walker. (Keith Kelly of Woodruff had a challenger too, named Roger Nutt.) Another candidate filed to run for House District 38, one who "considered himself a Republican since 1983" and who ran as a Republican, unsuccessfully, for a county seat in 2006. This year, he told the Herald-Journal, the county's Republican Party chairman "wouldn't let him" run against Bob as a Republican. So he filed to run as a Democrat.

Chambers, a Union native who has lived in Spartanburg County since the early 1970s, initially tried to run for Walker's seat as a Republican, but said Spartanburg County GOP boss Rick Beltram wouldn't let him.

"I called Beltram, and he said, 'That seat is not open. That seat is already taken by Bob Walker. Bob is working hard to keep that seat, and we don't need nobody to run against him. That seat is not open. ... You can't run for Bob Walker's seat.' So, I registered under the Democratic Party. They said they'd let me run for that seat," Chambers said.

Beltram called Chamber's story "a total lie."

But even Chambers holds no animosity toward Bob, he told the paper.

"I know Bob Walker - he is a good guy. He does got a lot of ideas. And I support what he has done, but I can do a better job, I believe," Chambers said. "I just need to get the people's trust to get me in there."

And on one controversial issue, Chambers took a firm stand.

When asked, Chambers said he would support tax credits for school choice. Controversial issues, from school district consolidation to cigarette taxes, should be put on the ballot and decided by referendum, he said.

"Longtime Republican running as Democrat - Mark Chambers: To go up against Walker"
Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC) - April 10, 2008

Bob responded to the primary challenge by scheduling a series of town hall meetings across his district, first in the small, old mill town of Chesnee to the east, then back in Landrum in early May.

On April 28, the Herald-Journal ran its first article identifying Joey Millwood for its readership. It called Millwood's challenge to Bob "a campaign battle of David-and-Goliath-like proportions," the political novice with a $500 budget challenging the veteran lawmaker with a $70,000 war chest. Millwood, it wrote, was knocking on doors and talking to voters on their front porches.

Millwood grew up in Whitney. He and his wife have lived in Landrum for about five years. He has one daughter, who is about 12 weeks old. He graduated from the University of South Carolina Upstate, where he wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper.

Though a first-time candidate, Millwood's campaign placard contains several messages that have been part of the South Carolina political dialogue for years.

It asserts the South Carolina state government has grown by 41 percent over the past three years, an almost verbatim reference to the way Gov. Mark Sanford introduced his version of the state budget this year. It also argues that a spending cap, tied to population growth and inflation, could eliminate the state income tax in the next 15 years - an issue Sanford campaigned on when he first won the race for governor in 2002.

While not attacking Bob directly, Millwood told the Herald-Journal he was "against big government" and said, "All I'll say is that I consider myself a strict conservative, who believes in less government, true tax reform and appointing conservative judges to the state bench."

That's a mantra that many conservative organizations could get behind - organizations such as the S.C. Club for Growth. The club took issue with several Spartanburg lawmakers last year when they named Judge Don Beatty to the S.C. Supreme Court. The club and other organizations classified Beatty as a liberal.

In a recent interview, the reporter in Millwood was clear, as he asked nearly as many questions as he answered. Often, he steered answers back to spending. On immigration reform, for instance, he would not discuss the pending legislation in Columbia, saying only that "any bill that helps with illegal immigration is a step in the right direction"

On school choice, Millwood said he would not support vouchers for parents who send their children to private school, but he would consider tax credits. It's competition, the free market at work, which would help create better schools, he said.

Millwood told the paper that he didn't "feel like I grew up in the best of schools, and I would have appreciated an option."

When the paper asked Bob about vouchers and tax credits, he opposed them. It seemed to be the brightest division between the two candidates.

Walker, 65, said he does not favor vouchers, and he hasn't supported any of the tax-credit proposals he's seen so far.

"I'm for choice as for what the parents feel like they need to do best," Walker said. "But I'm not for taking the taxpayers' money that's allocated to go to the public school system and give it to someone else."

Walker also highlighted work he's done to support private schools, charter schools, home-schooling and virtual schools.

"Walker's war chest not fazing Millwood - Challenger: Promises to rein in state spending"
Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC) - April 28, 2008

Two weeks later, both men appeared at a Republican candidates forum at Ron's Hog Pen BBQ. Even the Herald-Journal reporter who covered the meeting had difficulty finding much conflict between the various candidates for their offices on issues.

For some of the topics, many of the answers were predictable - no one opposed putting a cap on state spending, for instance, and no one outright opposed requiring private employers to use a federal database to verify that their employees are legal residents of the United States - though some talked around it.

Because of so many similar positions, the night was best served by being able to judge which candidates could think on their feet, who seemed the most passionate about different issues, who was the most informed about the issues affecting this state, and who could best handle themselves in front of a crowd. That's not to say there were no differences - just that, in some cases, those differences were just as much about poise as they were about positions.

House incumbent Bob Walker played up a stipulation he added to the immigration reform bill in Columbia that would prevent children here illegally from getting state scholarships.

Walker's challenger, Joey Millwood , got a burst of cheers when, after agreeing with Walker that the state government needs to be less involved in higher education, he suggested that part of the problem with rising tuition costs was overpaid "liberal professors."

For incumbents, the night was a chance to highlight their records. For challengers, it was a chance to try to prove their opponents disingenuous or, a favorite of the night, in the pocket of special interest groups.

"Light barbs on cue at GOP debate"
Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC) - May 13, 2008