Few U.S. politicians enjoy fiscal grandstanding more than South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford. Five years ago, the conservative Republican, who was
first elected in 2002, brought piglets under each arm to the state
legislature to protest pork-barrel spending. In heavily GOP South Carolina,
antics like that helped get him re-elected in 2006. So it’s hardly
surprising that Sanford, now chairman of the Republican Governors
Association, is one of the loudest voices in opposition to President Obama’s
$787 billion federal stimulus package. In fact, for Sanford it wasn’t enough
to declare this week that he’d reject a quarter of South Carolina’s $2.8
billion share of the funds unless he could use it to pare down the state’s
debt. On Thursday he even felt compelled to liken the stimulus to the
hyper-inflationary policies of Zimbabwe’s longtime leader, Robert Mugabe.
“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more
money that we don’t have and send it to different states, we’ll create
jobs,” Sanford said. “If that’s the case, why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place”
Obama’s stimulus “logic,” Sanford argued, “is being applied there with
little effect.”
But Sanford’s critics might ask their own rhetorical question: If the governor’s notoriously tightfisted ways are the answer, why isn’t South Carolina a rich place, instead of the state
with the nation’s second highest unemployment rate and crumbling schools, as Obama has noted more than once since taking office Even fellow
conservative Republicans in South Carolina were troubled by Sanford’s
Zimbabwe remarks, including 29-year veteran state senator and finance
committee chairman Hugh Leatherman. “That was one of the most asinine
comments any elected official could make,” Leatherman, 78, told TIME. “I’m
as conservative a person as ever walked the planet, but I also consider
myself a compassionate person who tries to make sure our people are taken
care of. Our people are hurting, and I’m going to fight as hard as I can to
get as much of that federal money into this state as I can.”
Leatherman, whom Sanford has reproached in the past because of state budget shortfalls, on Thursday introduced a measure to take advantage of a provision
in the federal stimulus legislation that lets state legislatures override a
governor’s rejection of the funds. It may well pass, especially since the
Republican speaker of South Carolina’s House, Bobby Harrell, is also at odds
with Sanford over the stimulus.
Still, most South Carolinians, like most Americans, know the stimulus is just part of a larger fight for the currently confused soul of the Republican Party. Now that Sanford has upped
the rhetorical ante, many wonder just how polarizing he and other GOP
governors like Texas’ Rick Perry — who announced Thursday he’ll also
decline a portion of his state’s stimulus money — intend to become in their
bid to preserve conservative fiscal principle and, perhaps in Sanford’s
case, position themselves as the Republicans’ presidential pick in 2012.
The debate over how to escape the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression seems a
battle that Sanford, 48, has been preparing for his entire political life.
Since leaving real estate to become a congressman in 1994 — the year Newt
Gingrich and the GOP stormed Capitol Hill pledging to rein in federal
largesse — Sanford has been the consummate fiscal hawk. He slept on an
office cot rather than rent a Washington, D.C., apartment; and, to his
credit, he limited himself to three terms in office to avoid assuming the Beltway’s
prodigal habits. In his 2000 book The Trust Committed to Me, he warned that
“politicians in our nation’s capital were unable — or unwilling — to control
spending. The more money the politicians sunk into their schemes, the more
expensive it got for the rest of us. I couldn’t expand my businesses because
the politicians kept expanding theirs.”
See pictures of the recession of 1958.
See pictures of the stock market crash of 1929.
