| | Issue #21.04 :: 01/23/2008 - 01/29/2008 | The Hit List
Secret Proposal Aims to Defeat Anti-Sanford Lawmakers
| BY FREE TIMES WRITERS
| By Corey Hutchins & Wes Wolfe
Amid longstanding rumors of a legislative “hit list” linked to the governor’s office and targeting between 15 and 20 state lawmakers for defeat in the upcoming June primaries, members of the General Assembly are now coming forward to say they believe they are being specifically targeted by a network of political advocacy groups and that Gov. Mark Sanford is either directly or indirectly involved in the effort.
It’s no secret that Sanford and the General Assembly don’t get along and several legislators and political consultants believe the governor — by proxy through the group South Carolinians for Responsible Government (SCRG) — targeted several GOP legislators in the 2006 elections. But, no one could produce a list or a plan of action. This time, SCRG appears to have taken a back seat to S.C. Club for Growth in trying to remake the General Assembly in the governor’s image, or as it’s phrased in a secret proposal to the group, “reshuffling the legislative deck.”
“It’s common knowledge all over Columbia,” said Rep. Carl Gullick, a Rock Hill Republican whose name appears on a leaked legislative hit list. “Basically, as a Republican, the governor is eating his young. It’s sick.”
The list on which Gullick’s name appears can be found in a proposal that former Sanford spokesman Will Folks allegedly submitted to the organization S.C. Club for Growth naming 31 legislators to be considered for targeting in the ‘08 primaries. The list names 27 Republicans and four Democrats.
The proposal, which was leaked by sources close to S.C. Club for Growth, states that the genesis of Folks’ involvement grew from an “unscheduled, hour-long” meeting between himself and the governor on Aug. 26 and a subsequent email from Folks to the governor outlining a strategy to target certain members of the General Assembly who are up for re-election this year.
For his part, the governor has denied being associated with any such list, both to newspaper reporters and directly to some of the legislators who have called him about the rumored hit list.
“The governor has not given tacit or any other kind of support to the idea of a hit list,” said Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer. “Look, what the Club for Growth wants to do is the Club for Growth’s business obviously. But the governor has said repeatedly that he is not going to be engaging in efforts to target individual lawmakers. And there’s no simpler way of saying it.”
As for the alleged Aug. 26 meeting and subsequent email, Sawyer said the governor often has impromptu meetings and that “if he crossed paths with Will that day it’s certainly possible that they had a conversation.” He added that the governor receives unsolicited political advice all the time and that “it’s very possible” Folks emailed the governor. Nonetheless, when asked if Folks is advising the governor in any capacity, he said, “No, that’s absolutely not the case.”
Whether the S.C. Club for Growth has adopted the proposal is unknown, and Sanford’s alleged ties to it are murky. Furthermore, it is not clear whether any of the proposed actions in the document would amount to violations of campaign law or would instead just serve as examples of hardball politics in action. Nonetheless, the proposal and the reaction of legislators to it sheds considerable light on the fractious relationship between Sanford and members of his own party, as well as on the role played by advocacy groups aligned with the governor’s agenda.
The Hit List
Chad Walldorf, a Beaufort County businessman and former deputy chief of staff to Sanford, is the chair of S.C. Club for Growth and confirmed on Dec. 26 that he’d been submitted a proposal that listed a group of targeted legislators. Walldorf said the author of the proposal was Folks and that the S.C. Club for Growth had not rejected the proposal but also had “yet to act” on it. Walldorf said Folks had “never received a penny” from S.C. Club for Growth.
The proposal, titled “Thoughts on creating a more conservative Republican majority in S.C.” was submitted by Folks to the S.C. Club for Growth “months ago,” according to Walldorf, and contains excerpts of an email Folks sent to the governor about targeting specific GOP legislators in the ‘08 primaries.
The list of “possible legislative targets” names 11 members of the S.C. State Senate and 20 members of the State House of Representatives.
Folks, on Dec. 27, neither confirmed nor denied authorship of the proposal.
“I’ve seen a zillion different lists and a zillion different memos about those lists,” Folks said. He said he is often asked to give his thoughts on different races. “I certainly, where it’s appropriate, do that.”
Folks said while he has never taken any money from S.C. Club for Growth, he wholeheartedly supports what the organization is doing.
Folks also neither confirmed nor denied meeting with Sanford in August, saying, “August? I don’t remember what I did on Dec. 26, and that was yesterday.”
When asked if he would confirm the email excerpted in the proposal, Folks said, “I’m not going to get into any personal conversations I’ve had with the man,” and said he wouldn’t “discuss the contents of a personal email to anybody.”
The proposal indicates that Sanford was initially skeptical during the Aug. 26 meeting about targeting specific members of his party in the General Assembly and that he was concerned that aspects of the strategy were “too risky” and was afraid of “burning bridges.”
The proposal states that in the days that followed, Folks sent an email to Sanford, at the governor’s request, reiterating points made during the meeting.
In the email, Folks tells the governor that concerns about burning bridges “should never again enter your thinking as it relates to the promising electoral math you are confronted with. There is simply no longer a tradeoff to ponder because they are going to give you nothing, period. No matter what you do, you will not get any less out of this system that you are currently getting, so there is no longer any risk.”
“Once you make the realization that this is a zero sum game,” the email continues, “everything should be focused on targeting 15-20 specific 2008 races and drawing a line in the sand … Again, this is not an air war [meaning a statewide TV and radio ad campaign], it’s 15-20 different ground wars. Don’t forget that.”
It is, according to the proposal, the idea of the “ground game focus” that resulted in an “extensive buy-in” from Sanford, leading many targeted lawmakers on the list to believe that the governor approves of the proposal to the S.C. Club for Growth.
When Tom Davis, the governor’s chief of staff, was asked about an Aug. 26 meeting between Folks and governor, he said he was unaware of it, or of any email correspondence between the two.
“I suspect,” Davis said of the proposal, “because Will’s been very active in this, that [he’s] probably made a similar pitch to SCRG or maybe some of those other groups.”
Folks said he considers himself a “convenient enemy” of those targeted legislators who believe he is the one executing the governor’s strategy in the primaries.
“I would say to all of those who wonder whether they’re on the list or not — or wonder whether they’re on my list or not — if they get beaten, then they’ll know they were on my list,” he said.
Legislators in the Crosshairs
Regardless of the importance of this particular proposal and its hard-to-prove links to the governor’s office, one thing is clear — some legislators believe they are being targeted, and they believe the governor is either directly or indirectly involved.
Sen. Jake Knotts, R-Lexington, is a former narcotics investigator and a targeted member of the General Assembly who didn’t need any reporter to tell him his name was on a hit list. He already knew he was being investigated by members of pro-Sanford groups.
Earlier this year when Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, first heard about groups possibly investigating Knotts, he was overheard saying in a meeting in a public place, “You don’t investigate an investigator.”
He was right.
Knotts’ own investigations of the governor have led to front-page stories in The State newspaper in past weeks. Knotts, who says Sanford is using numerous political action committees and nonprofits as slush funds, has already once caught him with his hand in the moneybag. In November, Sanford gave back $101,524.14, money that had been left over from a grant that went to pay for a National Governors Association convention in Charleston, and was given to a group called Carolinians for Reform. In response to having to refund the money, Sanford said in a Nov. 20 Associated Press story that he thought moving the cash to the organization made “complete sense.”
In response to Knotts’ slush-fund allegations, Sanford spokesman Sawyer says, “No, it’s not true, but consider the source here … Sen. Knotts has never let things like the facts get in the way of his political attacks on the governor.”
Other legislators on the hit list believe they’re being targeted exclusively because of their refusal to back the governor’s school choice plan.
At 11:20 a.m. Oct. 11, Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens, who had heard that he had been targeted by the governor, picked up the phone and called Sanford.
“Governor,” he said, “I’m just going to get down to why I called,” and he asked Sanford if it was true that a legislative hit list was being drawn up out of the governor’s office.
Sanford laughed.
Martin says the governor told him he appreciated the call and assured him there was no such list. “He said, ‘I’ve got nothing to do with that. My office has nothing to do with that.’”
Sawyer echoes the point: “There are more conspiracy theorists in the General Assembly on any given day than there have been in the totality of looking at the Kennedy assassination … It’s just that in this case, they’re all wrong.”
In his senate office on Dec. 18, confronted with the proposal to S.C. Club for Growth that listed his name as one of the targeted senators, Martin shook his head. “I don’t think they did it with Sanford’s blessing,” he said.
Other legislators disagree.
Rep. Bill Cotty, R-Richland, said he was quitting smoking a little after 4 p.m. Dec. 16, almost a month before he announced he would not seek re-election.
“This is my last cigarette,” he said, snuffing it out in an ashcan outside the door to his Columbia law office. But halfway through the strategy proposal showing his name on the list of possible legislative targets, Cotty was back at it, filling up an ashtray with Salem Ultra Lights.
Cotty, he’s been through this before.
“We had T-shirts with bull’s eyes on them [in ‘06],” he said, wreathed in smoke, above him a windowpane with a bullet hole in it. As a former divorce lawyer Cotty knows what it’s like to be on someone’s bad side, to have a mark on his head. Pellets, BBs, sometimes .22s, they’d come crashing through his office windows. But divorce law and politics, well, to him they shouldn’t be that similar.
Still it was no surprise when he heard his name was on a hit list. A man of conviction who says he votes the way he feels, Cotty’s voting record more often than not does coincide with the governor’s position. But there has always been one sticking point between them — school choice. And for Cotty, that was why SCRG targeted him in ‘06. His district was slammed with direct-mail attacks. Small plastic piglets were tied to mailboxes in his neighborhood with leaflets about pork-barrel spending. One mailer read that he’d voted in favor of giving condoms to 10-year-olds.
In a change of attitude different from that in December, Cotty announced Jan. 7 that he was going to leave the General Assembly to take a job in the private sector, a position working with innovative technologies in recycling and conservation.
The Governor’s Men (and Woman)
To achieve the goal of defeating targeted legislators, the proposal puts forth an “ideal list” for a “core council” staff. And in a part of the document noted as “sensitive,” the proposal calls for a direct link to the governor’s office that can’t be ignored.
Sanford Chief of Staff Davis appears third from the top of the list, and the proposal recommends his duties in the effort as “research” and as the person who should be in charge of a “contract for S.C.”
Davis said that he has not seen a legislative hit list and believes Sanford wouldn’t be a part of such an effort. “I’ve never seen any sort of a document, or any sort of a briefing on a hit list,” Davis said. “I can’t speak for the governor, but I’d be extremely surprised if the governor has met with somebody to go over a hit list. All the governor has ever talked about doing is advocating particular issues.”
According to the proposal, Folks’ presence within the group is not to be disclosed, and the document lists his duties as “strategy,” “message” and “black ops.”
Folks, who is president of the political consulting firm Viewpolitik and the founding editor of the blog FITSnews.com, is often chided for not publishing his client list and some political observers say privately that they believe he uses his blog as a tool for his clients who don’t want it public knowledge that they use his advice.
“Why is it that no one will admit to actually paying Will Folks for his advice?” said Luke Byars, the state director for U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint and former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party. “I guess there are some who are foolish enough to trust his judgment, but just smart enough to be embarrassed about it.”
Others believe Folks is very much still working with the governor and taking money via pro-Sanford groups, which Folks and some of those groups deny.
Countering arguments that he’s working with Sanford, Folks said he challenges anyone to find a web site more critical of the governor than his. Sawyer also strongly denies that Folks is working with the governor in any capacity. “Frankly,” Folks said, “we’ve had some bad blood for an extended period of time.” But those close to both Sanford and Folks say their relationship has been one of the love-hate variety and that they tend to “use each other.”
Beyond Davis and Folks, other names listed in the proposal as potential members of a “core council” include S.C Club for Growth chair Walldorf (listed as “overlord”) and SCRG employee Daleta Frye, the daughter of Leesville Republican Rep. Marion Frye. Frye’s work, like Folks’, is supposed to be “undisclosed,” but the proposal lists her responsibilities as “ground game, ad buys, research.”
Contacted Dec. 27 about her name appearing in the proposal and whether she was executing those listed duties, Frye said she wouldn’t comment on “the status of it” and called the proposal “not a public document.”
Listed also in the core council are consultants Jon Lerner (polling, strategy), Walter Whetsell (message, lead design, lead mailhouse) and B.J. Boling (strategy, message). Lerner was the consultant for Sanford’s second gubernatorial run, and Whetsell is considered one of the best direct mail consultants in the state and is working with presidential candidate Fred Thompson. Boling is a former employee at Whetsell’s firm, Starboard Communications (the firm responsible for the ‘06 direct-mail attacks on Cotty by SCRG), and is the S.C. campaign spokesman for U.S. Sen. John McCain.
Both Whetsell and Boling, in the thick of the primary race, said they did not know of the proposal and were too busy working in the S.C. primary. Lerner could not be reached for comment.
Lerner, Whetsell and Boling have all been criticized on Folks’ blog at least once, and the proposal mentions that a professional reconciliation would have to be reached to bring Lerner on board.
Some targeted lawmakers believe that while groups like S.C. Club for Growth, Reform SC and SCRG may tend to insulate the governor from getting involved in the fray, they could be harming him politically.
“The reason why [Sanford] hasn’t done anything [in office] is the people that surround him,” Knotts said. “The governor is a good guy. I could sit down and have a beer or go somewhere with the governor, and I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”
But not the members of those groups, he said. They create the problems.
Knotts said he believes the governor listens far too much to his advisers, people like Walldorf, Davis and Folks, and that because of it he gets some “bad information.”
“He has the end result of what he wants to do, but he has people that want to go about that the wrong way,” Knotts said.
The Key Issue — School Choice
Knotts’ critique of the governor’s style is widely shared by legislators on the list. The senators and representatives who tend to vote with the governor on most issues reiterate that Sanford’s lack of compromise on his school choice plan, and their opposition to it, has led to this Republican civil war.
Rep. Joan Brady, R–Richland, said she believed that she’d be a target because of her opposition to school choice and called it the most divisive issue in the State House. Rep. Gene Pinson, R–Greenwood, explained that his position on the list was probably related to school choice, as did Gullick and Rep. Keith Kelly, R-Spartanburg, and Sen. Martin. Rep. Lanny Littlejohn, R–Pacolet, said that if his name was on the list then it “probably boils down to school choice.” Cotty said he believed that the names on the list, from one to 31, made total sense if it was based entirely on the issue of school choice.
Not only is there precedent for this — see SCRG’s work in the ‘06 primaries — but a similar plan of action has been used in Florida.
In October, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush flew to South Carolina to raise money on behalf of Reform SC, making stops across the state. According to published estimates, Bush helped bring in more than $200,000. While the motivation for Bush’s trip to the Palmetto State has been cloudy, in Florida he is engaged in an effort similar to Sanford’s, relying on nonprofit advocacy groups to advance his political agenda.
One of Bush’s nonprofits, the Foundation for Florida’s Future, was founded in 1995 after he lost the ‘94 election for governor. The foundation was revived in 2005, and has been operating in much the same way as pro-Sanford groups here, promoting Bush’s voucher program, a similar plan to Sanford’s on school choice.
The Spirit of the Law
Though the targeting of legislators by pro-Sanford groups may look bad, none of it, on the surface, is illegal. That might not stop political opponents from trying to question some of Sanford’s tactics, however. In a Nov. 15 story in The (Charleston) Post & Courier, Knotts said he talked to McConnell and Sen. Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, who’s name appears on the hit list, about possibly launching a State Senate inquiry into the matter involving the National Governors Association conference and money being transferred to Carolinians for Reform.
There is a state law barring cooperation between independent groups (whether they are PACs or nonprofits) and political parties and candidates, to a degree. The proposal to S.C. Club for Growth shows that the strategy would look to violate the spirit of that law, if not the letter.
In a section titled “Non-coordinated Coordination,” the proposal states “one of the many benefits of the structural recommendations … is that it frees certain individuals who are loosely affiliated with your efforts to feed intelligence back to the ‘core council,’ thus opening lines of communication that do not run afoul of the law and that could have invaluable strategic benefit down the road.”
The emphasis in not violating the law seems to have been forgotten, however, in another section titled “Absentee Ballot Focus,” which states that because the organization can’t use the “magic words” like “vote for” or “vote against” a certain candidate, “developing this absentee voter intelligence and passing it along to the campaigns for inclusion in their materials will need to be a priority of our effort.”
Whether passing along such information is a violation of the law is largely in the eye of the organizations cooperating. According to S.C. Code Section 8-13-1300, an independent group can donate information or research to a campaign, but such a donation has to be disclosed by the campaign as an in-kind contribution and cannot exceed $1,000 in General Assembly races. Without thorough documentation, it would be hard for an outside party to determine whether such research actually cost more than $1,000 to compile, or whether the information was given to the campaign in the first place.
“It’s not easy [to prove a violation],” State Ethics Commission legal counsel Cathy Hazelwood said. “That’s why they’re called loopholes. You’ve got to have a lot of facts, and nine times out of 10 you’ve got to have somebody who gets disgruntled and is ready to spew.”
Davis said that if he or the governor were aware of an organization pursuing aims that could come close to breaking election laws in such a way, “we would advise that it was improper and not to engage in that activity. That’s black and white — it’s not even gray.”
Bracing for Attack
As for the hit list and the 15-20 district-race ground wars, the proposal outlines a strategy to employ tactics for success: direct mail, phone banks, new media and turnout. While the majority of the money would be spent on the lawmakers deemed most vulnerable via a “target weighing” process, others, like Knotts, Leatherman and Rep. Daniel Cooper, R-Anderson — chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee — would act as symbolic targets.
“Similarly, thick-accented bumpkins like Jake Knotts and [Rep.] Bill Sandifer could fall into the ‘symbolic target’ category,” the proposal states. “Ultimately, however, the effective use of ‘symbolic’ versus ‘actual’ targets is a wise strategic move.”
Though it is unknown whether S.C. Club for Growth is acting on recommendations in the proposal, legislators on the list have steeled themselves for their ‘08 races.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if I were on that list, because I disagree with [the governor],” said Rep. B.R. Skelton, R-Six Mile. “I’ll just have to see what happens.”
“[Sanford] has targeted people before,” said Rep. Tom Dantzler, R-Charleston. “It’s not unusual.”
Rep. Gene Pinson said he’s personally not worried. “I don’t expect anything less [from Sanford]” he said. “Just go with the flow.”
For the past six years, Sanford has been trying to get his proposals through a Republican-controlled General Assembly and one of the biggest criticisms of him is that he has yet to get anything done. Some observers of state politics believe that when it comes down to a legacy, if he can do what the proposal outlines, then he’ll leave office victorious.
Two years before he started his campaign for governor, Sanford and his crowd came up with the idea of David versus Goliath — working against entrenched interests, the status quo and the “good ole boy” system — something that has remained the consistent metaphor of his gubernatorial career. The problem is, says one GOP insider, they know how to be David, but they have no idea how to be Goliath. | |
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