Dear friends:

We have come a long way since Dr. King outlined his dream so eloquently. Last year, we elected our first African American President, illustrating for the first time in our history, perhaps, that collectively, we have the ability to look beyond race and elect the best person for the job.

But sadly, even as I write this, more than half our schools have at least 70 percent of their students living in poverty. Fifty-eight percent of our students last month were on free and reduced lunch. Nearly 10,000 children in our public schools are homeless. There are schools along the Corridor of Shame and elsewhere with holes in the walls, leaking roofs, broken toilets, and other third-world-like conditions.

And if you look at who’s attending these broken down schools, who’s falling into the achievement gap, which students are learning and which ones are being left behind, who’s getting suspended and expelled, who’s being disproportionately put in our special needs classes, and who’s ending up in our state’s prisons, it’s our African American children.

We can do better. Now is the time to complete the dream.

Exactly one year to the day before his life was taken in Memphis, Dr. King spoke from the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City, and he said, “Silence is betrayal.” He said that in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

It’s time to break the silence in South Carolina. In my first six months as Governor, I will moderate a live, televised call-in discussion of the challenges and opportunities that diversity provides in our state. I will ask a diverse panel of participants to assist me in that effort.

Today, as we honor the life of Dr. King, I want to challenge you to speak out for those who have no voice – our children. It’s their future we are sacrificing every moment we delay reform in South Carolina. It’s time to turn our state around in order to create jobs and a growing economy, a government committed to accountability, a state committed to improving schools, and leadership that accurately reflects our values. For too long, our government has been distracted and defined by narrow special interests, and it’s time to put our people first. That’s what Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged us to do.

Dr. King also said that there is such a thing as being too late. In his words: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

We have a responsibility – and an opportunity – to change things. The time is now to stand up, speak out, get involved, and be counted.

Together, I know we can complete the dream in South Carolina.

Sincerely,

Jim Rex

Dear Friend,

Two weeks ago, I announced my candidacy for Governor of South Carolina. In that short time, I have received a tremendous outpouring of support from people all across our state. South Carolinians are tired of being the punch line of national jokes, and they are looking for a Governor to bring back integrity, accountability and leadership to our state.

I plan to be the Turnaround Governor that South Carolina needs, and I pledge to work every day to create a government committed to accountability and to living within its means; a state committed to improving schools; and leadership that reflects South Carolina values – not the values of narrow special interest groups.

I need your help to get there. I hope you will support our campaign by helping me meet my fundraising goal. Wednesday marks the end of a crucial fundraising period, and any amount you can give – $25, $50, $500, or even $3500 – will help us as we work to bring a new direction to our state.

Over the past few years, I have built a great network of enthusiastic and supportive people, but we need to build an even bigger and stronger campaign. We must drown out the partisan rhetoric that will dominate this race and replace it with our positive message of bringing about a better South Carolina. I hope I can count on you to help create the change our state desperately needs.

In the coming weeks, I look forward to traveling across our great state, meeting hard-working South Carolinians, and sharing my vision for turning this state around. I look forward to your input, as well as your support.

Sincerely,

Jim Rex

In recent weeks, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows and speaking out in our nation’s major newspapers, explaining why he might become the only governor in the country to turn down federal stimulus funding for health care, education, and public safety.

The national audiences he is appealing to should be aware that Governor Sanford is not speaking for his state. In the real South Carolina, our leaders, Republican and Democrat, have watched in dismay as he has worked to further his political prospects at the expense of our state, touting grand principles with complete indifference to their practical effects.

Governor Sanford’s stubborn insistence on holding hostage $700 million in stimulus funding designed to plug the gaping holes in South Carolina’s decimated budget invites what the Republican chairman of the state’s Senate Finance Committee describes as “budgetary Armageddon.”

If he prevails, South Carolinians in every corner of the state will feel the effects.

Education budgets at the agency I oversee, cut by hundreds of millions of dollars already, will remain in shreds. More than 2,600 public education employees will lose their jobs, including 1,500 classroom teachers. State funding for schools will fall to its lowest level in a decade.

College tuition costs will skyrocket. Law enforcement, compromised by budget cuts already in a state with one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, will be further jeopardized, prompting the Governor’s own appointed head of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) to break ranks and publicly describe his decision as “devastating.” More than 3,000 criminals could be released. State troopers will be let go; prisons may close.

None of this real-life devastation seems to matter as much to the Governor as protecting the purity of his anti-government principles.

The leadership vacuum so well illustrated by the current crisis is nothing new to South Carolinians. We have paid a heavy price over six long and fruitless years for a governor who consistently puts politics ahead of policy and who cares little for what it costs his state in stalled progress and human suffering.

Former governors, Republican and Democrat, understood clearly the role of an engaged government in setting the stage for state prosperity. Their intensive and consistent focus on attracting jobs, improving public schools, building infrastructure, and creating opportunities to overcome poverty, bequeathed to Governor Sanford a state with an abundance of promise and opportunity.

Today, after years of shortsighted governing bent on reducing government at any cost and innumerable impasses between the governor and his Republican legislature, foreclosures in South Carolina are on the rise. Poverty has increased. Roads and bridges across the state are in disrepair. Prisons are understaffed and past capacity.

Unemployment, which was rising steadily even before the recession, has soared, reaching second-highest in the nation and heading rapidly for first place.

Education is now also endangered after improving substantially in recent years. Instead of tackling urgent needs including tax reform, adequate resources, and equitable funding to improve schools, we have been mired in useless debate over private school vouchers, engineered entirely by out-of-state ideologues attracted here by the governor’s indifference to public schools.

South Carolina’s leaders have done what we can to move our state forward without the benefit of an effective chief executive. In education, we have become a national leader in public school accountability and in expanding choices for parents and students within the system of public education. We have pursued innovations like teacher pay-for-performance and done the legwork on comprehensive tax and funding reform.

We will regain our momentum. But we will never recover the time wasted over the lost decade of this governor’s two terms.

Governor Sanford hopes his model of uncompromising fiscal austerity will make him the new face of a revitalized Republican party. He may seek to spread his style of leadership to the rest of the country as a candidate for president in 2012.

In his home state, we look forward to the day when solving problems will be more important than political stunts, when progress will matter more than abstract principle and personal ambition, and when the needs of real people assume their rightful place as the top priority of the governor who represents them.

Originally posted in The Huffington Post.
By Jim Rex