I BECOME less certain every day which Republican I prefer in the gubernatorial race, but I’ve felt sure from the start that it was an open-and-shut case on the Democratic side: Sen. Vincent Sheheen has impressed me from the first time I met him, with his solid grasp of our state’s problems, his focus on systemic reforms, his good-government instincts and his willingness to work across party lines.

So although I like Education Superintendent Jim Rex, I considered our meeting to discuss his campaign for governor little more than a formality. I quickly changed my mind. I still like Sen. Sheheen and may end up where I started, but Dr. Rex is not someone to be written off.

What makes Dr. Rex an attractive choice for governor is his clear understanding of what ails our state and how a governor ought to go about curing it — and a track record that suggests he actually might be able to deliver on his cure. More on that in a moment.

His argument for why he should be the Democratic nominee is that as the only Democrat in the race who has won statewide office — which he did by scraping past the Republican/Howie Rich/pay parents to abandon the schools juggernaut — he’s his party’s best shot for taking the Governor’s Mansion. If the race is still up for grabs, his ability to make that case might well be a determining factor in the June 8 primary, since he and Sen. Sheheen have very similar values and even priorities. (The third Democrat, Sen. Robert Ford, has built his campaign on the fool’s gold of resurrecting the video poker barons and by currying favor with the Rich/voucher gang.)

On the day we sat down with Dr. Rex, the political buzz was about an effort to boost legislative support for a cigarette tax increase by settling for 30 cents instead of 50. That idea was not a little annoying to a candidate who has been pushing a plan most legislators won’t even touch: to raise the tax to $1 a pack, still about 40 cents below the national average but enough to help keep from laying off another 1,000 or so teachers.

He brought up the cigarette tax debate as “a great case study” of our state’s malady: Whenever anything is proposed that would shake up the status quo, “The most common response is ‘no.’ The next most common response is ‘not now.’ Form a study committee. Kick it down the road — preferably until after the next election. And if ‘no’ and ‘not now’ don’t work, then it’s ‘not that much’ as a fallback. That’s where we are now.”

He’s right about the cigarette tax (even at 50 cents), and he’s right in applying his diagnosis to any number of things our state needs to do: comprehensive tax reform, rewriting outdated education funding formulas, restructuring state agencies, rethinking our overall approach to government — all of which he supports, and all of which are currently being studied or will be studied in the coming year by committees created by the Legislature to avoid taking action.

“That modus operandi has permeated the legislative process,” he said, “and it’s devastated our state.”

His cure: “leaders who are willing to risk re-election” in order to move our state forward.

This is where he likes to remind people that he is a “post-career politician,” who worked a full career in public and higher education without dabbling in politics, retired and then decided to run for office — that is, someone willing to risk re-election.

One of the main things he has determined in three and a half years in office — other than what ails our state — is that “you cannot change South Carolina’s government or South Carolina from Columbia.” If he’s elected, he would put together a plan to overhaul the government to work in an era of reduced budgets (“turn-around CEOs don’t come into a company with a detailed plan; you have to kick the tires”) and adopt or build on whatever tax proposals the Legislature’s tax study commission makes. Then he would spend a year holding town-hall meetings around the state, getting feedback but also building support for his plans.

If that sounds like the way Gov. Mark Sanford kept promising he would get his own plans enacted, there’s one critical difference: Dr. Rex has actually done it. In his first year in office, he held 30 town hall meetings across the state. He credits those meetings with creating the grassroots support that led to unanimous legislative approval of plans to overhaul the state’s school testing system and to free school districts from some of the spending constraints lawmakers have put on them, as well as majority support (though not the two-thirds needed to overcome Mr. Sanford’s veto) for a muscular public school choice program.

Of course, it’s one thing to get the Legislature to overhaul a testing program that practically everyone in the state hated, or even give schools spending flexibility when it’s stripping their funding to record lows; quite another to convince lawmakers to overhaul a tax system that needs overhauling primarily because it’s a glob of special-interest favors, or to make fundamental changes to their notion of what government is.

But in this state, even accomplishing the former is significant — certainly not something to be written off.

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE
Associate Editor
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

Finally, we have some good news in our state of South Carolina. Imagine having a governor who is an educator. Imagine having a state license plate that declares South Carolina as the education state.

I strongly endorse S.C. Superintendent of Schools Jim Rex as a candidate for governor. I don’t care whether he’s a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, a Gamecock or a Tiger. He is an educator.

This is the kind of leadership that will elevate our state and establish a foundation for our future.

John T. Acorn, Pendleton

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