Interview with
Dr. Donald Fowler
by West Forum Director, Dr. Blease Graham
September 9, 2004
Gambrell Hall, University of South Carolina
Dr. Fowler's Background
Graham: It might help us to get started just to learn a little bit about you, what your background is, and how you came into a public service career.
Fowler: Well, I was born and grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Went to public schools there, and graduated from Wofford in 1957, and then went off to graduate school, and then the Army. I was out of state seven years and moved here to teach at the University of South Carolinain the spring of 1964. I’ve been here ever since. I got into politics just like most people do. I just volunteered.
Graham: Where did you study political science and what was your dissertation about?
Fowler: Most of my graduate studies were at the University of Kentucky. 
Malcolm Jewel, who was quite a scholar in his own right, was my principal professor and dissertation director. My dissertation had to do with the origins of the modern Republican Party. It was a statistical study, trying to identify the geographical areas as well as the demographic groupings of people from whom the modern Republican Party emerged ... primarily in South Carolina, but I treated other states as well. That was…I won’t say a labor of love, but it was … Nobody loves their dissertation.
Graham: Well, it stood the test of time. It’s been read in classes here.
Fowler: It was useful for me and it was about a subject I had a keen interest in.
Graham: It gives a good cast on sort of what today we call the rural-urban split in terms of voting. [Back to Topics]
Origins of Dr. Fowler's Career in Politics
Fowler: I remember going down to volunteer for the Lyndon Johnson campaign that year, and I thought they would give me some big job with great responsibility. They said, “Sure. Answer the telephone and stuff these envelopes.” That literally is true, so that was the beginning of my public service. That was in Columbia.
Graham: And after that you soon followed on into an official position with the state Democratic Party as executive director?
Fowler: I became executive director of the Party in 1967, and in 1971 was elected chair. And I served as a state chair for nine years. I’ve been active in the Party both here and at the DNC since then. I still am.
Graham: What are some of the things you’ve done with the national Party? Didn’t you actually run one of the national conventions?
Fowler: In 1988. I was CEO of the ‘88 Convention. I’ve done a lot of things that have really been wonderful and I’ve enjoyed them. I don’t want to burden you with too much detail, but I was President of the State Chairs Association, which was a great experience.
Graham: Students might be interested in knowing just what does the State 
Chairs Association do?
Fowler: Well, there’s a State Chair in every state obviously, so they’re 50…actually there’re 55 because there’re certain jurisdictions that have representation on the DNC that are not states. Puerto Rico for one, District of Columbia and so forth. And it’s an association that meets regularly, has an agenda, has an official set of officers and staff, and the purpose is to do those things for state chairs that they find useful. Their training sessions, information sessions. They set up programs that state chairs find useful. And frequently they spend a lot of time exerting the influence of state chairs within the DNC and with members of Congress and so forth.
Graham: And this normally helps give the party some organization, some focus, some kind of a grass roots or at least a state level…
Fowler: The Democratic Party – and I think this is true of the Republican Party as well – is centered – in my judgment – too much in Washington. And the State Chairs Association is the single group that sort of pulls it back to the state level. Because it’s the only one that has sufficient membership that’s spread widely enough to provide a deterrent to Washington completely taking over. And I think that’s true in both parties, not just ours. [Back to Topics]
Views on "Super Tuesday"
Graham: Did you play any role in Super Tuesday, inventing Super Tuesday, or?
Fowler: No.
Graham: You’re not a fan of Super Tuesdays?
Fowler: No. I have in fact resisted many of these reforms.
Graham: That would be like the McGovern-Frazier Commission?
Fowler: Well, I was for a lot of that, but I found the whole notion of Super Tuesday a little bit offensive. That’s not the right word…
Graham: Preemptive.
Fowler: The purpose of it was simply to get enough Southern states to have their primaries or their caucuses on a given day early in the process so that the Southern States could give the nominee a distinctive Southern cast or flavor. The first Super Tuesday was in ’88 and there were eight Southern States – I think – not including South Carolina, that had their processes early. They sort of split evenly.
Now keep in mind this was to give the nominee a Southern flavor. They split evenly between Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore. I don’t know what kind of Southern flavor that was. [ See Dr. Fowler’s adverse reaction to “Super Tuesday” in a March 9, 1988 PBS McNeil-Leherer Newshour at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/retro/super_tuesday_88.html]
Graham: Sort of like a Frank Howard outcome, wasn’t it? But do you find that all this is maybe taking away from the conventions, that there really is this front-loading thing that people write about in the way these primaries have affected both parties? [Back to Topics]
Problems With the Current Presidential Nominating Process
Fowler: Yes, clearly. I really have theoretical and practical problems with the 
way we do things now. I think the process starts much too soon, people get tired of it, it becomes terribly expensive. And the way the sequence runs now and has for a number of years…what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire is supremely important because the way the media play the results in those two states is that it’s not only information about who wins and who loses. It becomes a determinant of people’s perceptions about winners and losers, and it actually affects people’s preferences in subsequent processes.
So, when you get past Iowa and New Hampshire, you have in almost every case – and this is true in both parties – winnowed the field to two or three candidates. In the Republican cycle in 2000, when they didn’t have an incumbent, they had seven or eight people who started out early. And by the time New Hampshire was over, they were down to Bush and McCain.
It was just about that same way this year in 2004 with respect to Democrats because by the time Iowa and New Hampshire had run, everybody essentially was dead except Edwards and John Kerry. Now, there were others who attempted to contest South Carolina and a few other places, but everybody was effectively out except Kerry and Edwards. And I don’t think that’s good for the system. Plus, we moved the timing up in 2004 to January. And I just think that that stretches the process out too long and people get tired of it. [Back to Topics]
How Volunteers Are Brought Into the Process
Graham: A young person in your shoes today would end up volunteering more for a candidate than to work for a party’s candidate or in a party.
Fowler: No, I don’t think so. It’s always been that way.
Graham: Has it?
Fowler: Yes, it really has. I have rarely endorsed anybody in a multi-candidate field until late in the process. My orientation personally has always been to the Party.
Graham: But I was really referring like when you volunteer to work in 1964, answering the telephone and stuffing envelopes. That was really more for a party.
Fowler: Well, it was a general election.
Graham: In that stage? Yeah.
Fowler: It was a general election at that stage.
Graham: Do you think a lot of students get maybe drawn into volunteering for a candidate and maybe when that candidate loses, students get kind of turned off, or?
Fowler: Well, yes. But on the other hand, initially, again it’s true in both parties. The nominating process…the fact that multiple candidates get out there and contend for votes and support is for both parties the most effective recruiting tool for new party members and participants of anything else that the parties do.
In the general election, you have a lot of commotion and a lot of activity, but that’s mostly on the part of people who have already been brought into the Party. It’s rare that any significant number of people – now you find outstanding individuals – but number of people who come to a party and stick with the party in the general election process. It’s mostly in the nominating process.
Now, a lot of people do get in and they’re for John Q. or Suzie Brown or whoever. And when John Q. or Suzie Brown loses, they drop out, but a lot of them stay. A lot of them go to another candidate or just adopt whoever wins the nomination. It is the nominating process, particularly when a party is out of power; when there are multiple nominees as it was the case in 2004 with the Democrats and 2000 with the Republicans. It’s the principal recruiting mechanism or process in the four year cycle. [Back to Topics]
The Definition of Public Service
Graham: We’ve been talking about civic involvement in terms of working with parties and elections, and of course that’s one aspect of public service. Do you have a broader idea of what public service is as that term is given and how students might react to that? For example, I know you’ve done work in Public Administration at the Master’s level, which is the kind of thing an appointed civil servant might do. So, don’t you think public service is a much bigger term, where working in campaigns is…?
Fowler: I think generically public service can take place anywhere within any 
profession, or any industry or occupation. It’s generally referred to in just conversation to something having to do with government, or being elected, or serving in an appointed position. But people in industry are very involved in public service through the Chamber of Commerce and there’s the United Way. People who are working class people who are members of their unions and members of their churches. People who are appointed or who are lifetime professional government workers are public servants. There are opportunities to assist the public to be a positive, contributing member of society in any occupation. It’s a broadly applicable term that we think of mostly in terms of politics and government.
Graham: So students in political science classes even if they are business majors can understand this broader idea of public service.
Fowler: Absolutely. And you mentioned public administration. Politicians – people who run for office – elected officials – people who get elected to office – are generally more prominent or well-known. But some of the finest public servants who render the greatest good for the largest number of people are professional governmental workers who gain expertise in protecting the environment, in promoting economic development, in providing healthcare services, in providing welfare and social services where needed. Their contributions are immense.
A lot of those professions require a very high level of expertise. We’ve kind of lost the Jacksonian notion that any citizen can field any job in government. It is a highly technical, professional pursuit these days. And you take a bureau chief in the Department of Health and Environmental Services here in South Carolina. That person’s work can benefit the public in many, many ways. And you and I both know there are many examples of that, whether it’s DHEC, or DNR, the Department of Natural Resources, or whatever it might be. From the Highway Department – you see how old I am, I still call it the Highway Department.
Graham: It’s just like the person who makes the call that thinks there’s a communicable disease, that people need to be quarantined, or tell us what fish we can eat out of which lakes and that sort of thing.
Fowler: All of that’s our health service. And it’s very valuable.
Graham: Do you think public service or ideas of public service today are blunted by this sort of pervasive idea of mistrust of government or negative attitudes about government?
Fowler: Well, we’ve always had that as you know. That’s always been a part of our culture.
Graham: It may lead back to Jacksonians.
Fowler: That’s correct. That’s where a lot of it comes from for sure. But I think the professional government worker has learned to take that with a grain of salt and has been persistent and loyal to his or her duties. It hurts some. I think it probably deters more in the recruiting process, particularly when you have a candidate or a set of issues that puts government in a bad light. It deters people from going into government work. But I think those who are there and have become established just learn to live with that. [Back to Topics]
Working With Governor John West
Graham: Of course, that was a big change in South Carolina politics, wasn’t it? I mean there was the Johnson administration’s programs that in effect expanded government, like in the McNair administration with the planning and grants and all that; and on into the administration of Governor West. You knew Governor West fairly well, didn’t you? It was on a day-to-day basis almost. What was it like working for him as a public servant?
Fowler: Well, it was a great pleasure. I have said this a hundred times and I 
really mean it. I have never known anybody at that level, elected to that level of public service – Governor – who every day, day after day, made his decisions based exclusively on what he thought was in the best interest of the people. I’ve never known anybody who has lived by that standard as long and as completely as he has. It’s not to say that he didn’t take politics into consideration. He didn’t get elected Governor by being naïve, nor by being a saint, but he had a sense of the public good refined and honed to a level that I have found very, very rare. He was just the very best at that.
Graham: Can you explain that, or is it something you just observe, or recognize?
Fowler: I think it’s deeply rooted in his character. I’m sure somewhere his mother taught him, or his father, or… He gained that through family and through the church. John West was not pious and he wasn’t a saint, but John West was quite a churchman and he was devoted to his church. He was devoted to his family. He really is the prototype of a person whom you can admire whether he works for a bank, or as a mechanic, in the garage, or as Governor, or as an accountant, or whatever. He had the basic virtues that we all hold dear, just refined to a high degree in his personality.
Graham: Is that what carries him across the change? He has one foot in old, one party politics – you know, the delegation leader, the Senator, the king of the small empire of the county. And then on the other end, he’s in this very competitive two-party environment by the 1970’s which requires a whole different mindset in a way. Don’t you think? [Back to Topics]
Governor West's Principled Adaptability
Fowler: Well, John West was a good person. John West was also very smart. He recognized that the times they was a changin’. And he felt that to do his role, to play his role successfully as a senator, as a member of the Highway Commission, as Lieutenant Governor, then Governor, then as Ambassador, and in many roles after that, that he had to recognize reality and adjust to the changing times.
You know, people have said that the American people are not ideologues. We are pragmatists, which means that we look at a set of circumstances, assess the various streams of influence there, and fashion the solution that works for the people. And John West could do that as particularly relates to race, which is an area that he exhibited all of the best values of our society. I think that stemmed and came from a deep and moral commitment to the equality of all human kind.
He was a politician. He grew up in the segregated South – as did I. But I think he recognized the injustices in those circumstances. He also recognized that you couldn’t blink your eyes and snap your finger and change things, but boy he was out there on the fringe. He was pushing the envelope with race relations in every step. He was the first person to hire a professional for his staff. He was the first prominent elected official of any kind to openly attend a meeting of the NAACP in South Carolina. He was roundly criticized for it by the way.
And he did so many other things. He created the Human Relations Council. He did so many other things that moved South Carolina out of the segregated Old South into the New South. As Hubert Humphrey would say, “Out of the shadow of state’s rights, into the sunshine of human rights.” John West lived that.
Graham: Were you with him more when he was campaigning or while he was actually governing or was holding office? Or was it a little of both? [Back to Topics]
Implementing Important Changes in South Carolina
Fowler: It was both, but I think it’s fair to say that my personal relationship with him –not the first time that I met him, but the time when we really worked together – was born out of his campaign and extended into and through his tenure as Governor and long beyond.
But let me digress just for a second here. You can say all sorts of things about John West. But he was one of three or four or five governors in South Carolina that came in a very short period of time. All of whom were enlightened, all of whom progressive, and all of whom really moved this state forward. And the progress that we as a people enjoyed was due in major proportion to the continuity of that positive, and I will say progressive – I won’t say the word liberal – but progressive leadership.
It really started with Hollings and Donald Russell – although his term as Governor was somewhat shortened because he went to the Senate – to Bob McNair and to John West. And that’s not to say anything about their predecessors or the people who followed them. I happen to think that Jim Edwards, who was a Republican – all of those people I named are Democrats – but Jim Edwards, who is a Republican, I disagree with some of his policies, but I thought he was a fine governor in the sense of being able to … and a fine public servant … in addressing the problems that he faced.
But those five people…four people, I guess, in that sixteen year period just did this state a marvelously good job. And it was the continuity through that period of time that enabled John West to sort of cap what the others had done and to move much further than he might have done if he had stood singularly in that tradition.
In those sixteen years, we moved from a segregated society to at least officially an integrated society. We moved from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial society. It was a huge change. And the change was not easy. The change was difficult. And it was fraught with all sorts of frictions, but those people were wonderful leaders and John was unique among them. He did come at the end and he did have the base and the background of all the others, but he took full advantage of it.
Graham: There was a little competition among them for elective [oh sure] office, wasn’t there?
Fowler: They were not all bosom buddies.
Graham: Yeah, but they made friends. Again back to this practical…I mean, you fight a good battle in a primary and then an election, but once it’s over you work together for the good of the state. [That’s right] And ideology doesn’t triumph for long in that… Can you think of some instances that would illustrate the kinds of things you’re describing about Governor West? [Back to Topics]
Governor West Vetoes the Death Penalty Bill
Fowler: This is one that was unsuccessful, but it was monumentally an exercise 
of his conscience. During I think the last year – the latter part of him term anyway – the Supreme Court reversed its opinion about the death penalty and said in effect that the death penalty was constitutional. There were a few years there when the death penalty was unconstitutional.
Well, John West was opposed to the death penalty. I mean, he was morally and on principle opposed to the death penalty. And when the Supreme Court changed its opinion, the State Legislature passed a law reinstating the death penalty. John West got that bill, he vetoed it, wrote a stinging indictment of the death penalty, and sent it back up to the Legislature. They overrode his veto, but he made his point clear. And I think even the people who disagreed with him understood that this was a point of conscience for him and that he was not going to acquiesce for political expediency.
I remember another time and as we do this tape we are at the 30 th anniversary of this set of events. But in the Democratic Primary of 1974, we had a bunch of people and an unknown person won the primary, just out of the blue, Pug Ravenel. It was a marvelous thing, an entertaining, wonderful, political drama. But without going into all of the details, the State Supreme Court in effect denied him a position on the Democratic Party ballot for the general election because he did not meet the State Constitution’s residential requirement.
And there were weeks of maneuvering as to what the Democratic Party would do. And there were two or three weeks where I virtually lived in the Governor’s mansion, sitting there with him. Sometimes in stone-cold silence because we didn’t know what to talk about, trying to figure it out and trying to find the best way to deal with that very difficult situation in terms of fairness to the candidates, fairness to the people, while maintaining legal propriety and doing things right.
And John West never wavered from a clear set of standards that were real in his 
mind about what was fair, it had to be legal, and what he would do. And he was willing to stake himself. Those were very difficult times. I was the State Chairman of the Democratic Party then and he and I sort of suffered through that together. But it was another example of … here’s a guy who was at the end of his term, but he was no less sincere and no less insistent on the public’s interest and the public’s protection at the end of his term that he was at the beginning. He was just as sincere then as he would have been in the first three months of his term. And it was a difficult time and it was very meaningful to me that he would put up with all of this because in one sense it was my problem. But, he recognized that he as Governor had a responsibility and he fulfilled it in a maximum way. [Back to Topics]
Battle Over the Second Medical School
Graham: Are there other hallmarks of his administration that you might know about? Like the second medical school? That was one of the big controversies of legislation, wasn’t it?
Fowler: You know, a lot of people speak about John West in terms that I do … of values and principles. John West was a very good politician.
Graham: He knew how to count noses, didn’t he?
Fowler: Oh yes, he did. The second medical school you mentioned was something that was near and dear to his heart, and he was convinced that South Carolina needed it, primarily because we as a state lacked local, what we call now primary care physicians. We called them general practitioners back then, family physicians. We lacked those people. We had almost an appropriate mix of specialists, but we lacked the general practitioners, the GP’s, the family physicians. And he wanted a second medical school here in Columbia to focus on training primary care physicians. And that was something he felt deeply about and he was willing and able to go to the wall to get it.
Well, there was all sorts of jockeying around. Of course, the folks in Charleston who were supporters of the Medical University were opposed to it because they thought that would take away from their local responsibilities, and you understood that and John understood that. And there were people who said, “You can’t do it. It costs too much money.” Well, he counted noses and he got down to needing just three or four votes in the House. And he found out from his good friend Dick Tookie, who was the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Spartanburg, that the people in Spartanburg dearly wanted a branch of the University in Spartanburg.
So, over a couple of toddies, they talked about this; and the people in Spartanburg weren’t particularly enamored with the second medical school. But they dearly wanted this branch of the University. And guess what? They got their branch of the University and John West got his second medical school. And that’s how it was done and it was masterful politics; and I will have to say that it was good for South Carolina. It has been. It was one of his greatest contributions to the state and its people. [Back to Topics]
Governor West's Role In Recruiting International Business
There’s another thing that you don’t hear as much about. He was one of the pioneers in inducing, encouraging, persuading foreign industry to settle in South Carolina. He went on any number of trade missions and broke real ground, particularly with Europeans...European companies coming here. And Fritz Hollings sort of established the pattern to get industries from other parts of the United States to come and settle here. But John West took that a step further. And I will say that Bob McNair and Donald Russell both performed admirably in economic development.
But John West was the person who in effect took this offshore in an effective fashion. And it created a wave of foreign investments in South Carolina. It’s been very good for the state economically, but it’s been very good for the state socially and politically as well, because it gives the people of South Carolina a view of the rest of the world because people from foreign countries have come and lived here and lived in our communities – people from Japan, Germany, Switzerland, lots of other countries, France – and moved here. And that’s good. It makes us more knowledgeable of the world and our people have gone to these countries to be trained there, to learn about those industries. So, that’s another major contribution that John made.
Graham: That’s a strand too back to his time as a legislator because he was involved – along with others, I’m sure – in creating the technical education system for us.
Fowler: I have counted. There are 922 people who claim parentage of the technical education system.
Graham: One time the Governor said there should be a paternity suit to try to find the father of the system. In terms of his political career, he often referred to running Senator Brown’s 1954 campaign. Do you think Senator Edgar Brown had an influence over Governor West?
Fowler: Well, Senator Edgar Brown was one of the smartest, wisest people I’ve ever known. I frankly cannot speak in great detail to that relationship. But everybody who knew Edgar Brown learned something. [Back to Topics]
Dr. Fowler Recalls the 1970 South Carolina Election Campaign
Graham: Some scholars refer to the 1970 election as a peculiar election. I know Governor West has referred to his opponent Albert Watson as having been a student in his class when he was teaching here while he was a law student. And I know that Watson even earned an A in his class. But things weren’t quite so congenial during that election.
Fowler: It was a very, very tough, divisive campaign. And it was racial. No question about it. John had established during his career a reputation for being a moderate. Not a liberal, but a moderate, willing to work and move and push as best he could. It was before he ran for governor that he went to this NAACP meeting and he was severely criticized during that campaign for having done such a thing.
There was a third party that entered that race, the United Citizens Party. They nominated two black people, Tom Broadwater and J.C. McTier. Julius Constantine McTier, I love that name. And there was a real apprehension that if John West did not get the great majority -- the vast majority -- of the black vote, that he couldn’t win. And so there were lots of issues in that campaign that were important: industrialization, relations with the federal government, a lot of specific programs, some of which Bob McNair had initiated – food stamps and so forth. But it boiled down to being merely racial.
In September of that campaign, a group over in a little town in Darlington County turned over a school bus – physically, literally turned over a school bus – with a few black kids in it being taken to school. And John roundly condemned that. His opponent didn’t. And I believe in the big picture that might have been the decisive matter, the decisive event – or reaction to that event that determined the outcome of that race.
As it turned out, Governor West received over 90% of the African-American vote. He won by 25 thousand votes. I’ve always thought that the United Citizens Party ticket was put there deliberately to drain votes away from John. It didn’t work. I was involved in that process. I’m intimately familiar with it. It’s one of my proudest moments.
Let me say one other thing about John West and race. We’ve talked about the medical school, economic development, modernizing government. All of those things are part of his heritage. But I think uniquely, the way that he dealt with race was probably his most important, unique, lasting contribution. I’ve already mentioned several of the things he did. He did appoint Jim Clyburn as a professional member of his staff – now Congressman Clyburn. He did create the Human Affairs Commission which was specifically created to provide a forum where frictions and disagreements over racial matters and other matters – gender matters as well – could be brought for resolution. He was a person who constantly was sensitive to the aspirations of African-Americans and he always was quick to provide soothing, conciliatory thoughts and influences on difficulties that arose in South Carolina because of race. [Back to Topics]
Partisanship: Benefits and Costs
Graham: Just to kind of switch to current circumstances, Governor West talked repeatedly about the importance of nonpartisanship, or a healthy bipartisanship approach to contemporary politics. What do you think is the state of political competition and a kind of healthy political discourse here in the year 2004?
Fowler: I think the country is probably more divided along partisan lines than 
it’s ever been. I’m sure it’s that way as it relates to my lifetime. I believe in political parties. I believe in the value and the contributions of political parties. I am a partisan and proud of it. But I think we have moved beyond the judicious use of party and the judicious application of differences between the parties. There are differences between the parties. There’re differences between peoples in this country. And the parties I think should reflect those differences.
But what we have come to now – and I think both parties are guilty of this to some degree or another – we are so insistent on our partisan prerogatives that we forget the public interest. And John West never did that. He never did that. With John West as a leader, you would never have what we have today where many good things that people need that government should do and could do, don’t get done because either one party or the other thinks the other will gain some advantage of it. And we create issues; we create obstacles that will pose a block to cooperation from the other party, because of the fear that somehow the other party will get some advantage.
He was a partisan, he was a Democrat, no question about that. I used to fuss at him a little bit because I thought he was too good to some Republicans. But he appointed a fair number of Republicans – people whose names you would recognize as Republicans – because he thought that their service would be meaningful to the state of South Carolina. George Dean Johnson he appointed as Chairman of the State Development Board. Now, a comparable position would be Secretary of Commerce. And George Dean was a Republican and he said, “Well, he’s a bright guy. He’s got a lot to contribute to the state. He has a lot of contacts.” And he appointed him. He appointed General Westmoreland to another position to help small, rural counties in their economic development. And he didn’t establish any partisan criteria or bar that General Westmoreland or George Dean Johnson had to jump over. He did that because it was good for the people of South Carolina, and we just don’t find that kind of compassion, that kind of understanding.
Graham: How did we get in that fix? Is it that we’re too intrigued by scandal or we’re too interested in calculations of just winning at all costs?
Fowler: I’m not willing to make the media the bogeyman for all our political ills. But I do think that television introduced a capacity for individuals and parties to take their messages to extremes in order to gain political advantage, and that temptation to do that – to use that very powerful medium to do that – sort of over years incrementally increased and accentuated itself so that one side would use television in a very mean and nasty way and the other would try to do the same thing. I think that’s part of it.
I think it’s also, frankly, the fact that somewhere we just got lost in our social values, in what John West had. A sense that, “Yes, I am a partisan, but the people are more important than my party.” It’s the evolution of a mass culture. It’s the media. It’s special interest groups making more and more severe demands on politicians, and they demand that politicians be more absolutist in terms of their interests. And they through money or through numbers or through other means gain a claim on a politician’s reelection or political promotion, so they can enforce those kinds of extreme positions. There’s nobody that could ever enforce that kind of claim on John West.
Graham: Things like these pledges where the legislator signs a no-tax pledge – I guess that is a famous one – or takes a position on a certain issue in a campaign speech at …. But this will be the one expression of a position on an issue. And then that gets exploited. And you see that today in the presidential elections with these 527 groups, these parallel groups that aren’t candidate or party centered but yet have a powerful impact on what people think and see in political discussions. [Back to Topics]
Unanticipated Consequences of Political Reforms
Fowler: So many of our political reforms have had unanticipated consequences. And I think the 527 groups – their growth and importance -- McCain-Feingold didn’t invent them, but it accentuated their importance. I think that that’s one of the unintended consequences it has. It has accentuated the divisiveness and also separated the responsibility for political actions and for political messages from the candidates themselves. And that’s the worst of both worlds. You’ve made the charges, the differences more severe, more critical. But you’ve also separated those charges from the candidates. I could talk about that for hours. But the claim of independence of these is just ludicrous. I mean, they are independent in a very narrowly defined, legal way; but they are not substantively or politically independent at all.
Graham: And they get down to making very specific plays for a very specific group of voters even in a specific circumstance to try to carry and election one way or the other, don’t they? And in many ways ignore the public interests that Governor West returned to time and time again.
Do you see a way out of this? I mean, is this going to be politics of the next decade? Or do you think there’ll be changes along the way?
Fowler: The system always changes; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. I cannot right now see an avenue, a course, that’s going to get us out of this in any short period of time. These 527’s might fall into such corruption and disrepute that we’ll get rid of them. But I don’t see how that’s going to happen in the short range.
Graham: In many ways, what we’ve talked about on the national level has been repeated at the state level too, with the big increased number of interest groups and lobby groups in South Carolina politics. And I suppose at the local level as well. In many ways, it’s a constant campaign, as some people have described it.
Fowler: And that’s what it is. It’s a constant campaign. I can’t remember the exact figure, but I think it’s $5000 a week that a United States senator has to raise on the average for six years in order to fund his campaign for reelection. That’s a price that’s staggering. $5000 a week for six years. I mean, that’s just incredible.
Graham: People have to spend time on the telephone talking with donors or going to events to raise money rather than thinking about issues or engaging in debates about…
Fowler: That’s correct. The poor House people who live in competitive districts, they do it all the time. There is never a time in Washington, particularly, when there is not fundraisers for somebody. January of 2005, there’ll be a bunch of fundraisers up there.
Graham: And this money is reported. Isn’t that one of the aspects of campaign reform, that at least as a citizen we know who’s giving.
Fowler: Well, I think the reports are good, but they’re not sufficient. Everybody does it, so people are not going to spend two hours every day…
Graham: It’s just a mass of information, all that noise.
Fowler: It is. It’s noise and not information. [Back to Topics]
The Future of South Carolina's Democrats
Graham: Maybe one last question. People refer to South Carolina as a safe Republican state. Do you think Democrats are competitive in South Carolina?
Fowler: Only in certain areas. We have a race for the Senate in 2004 here, where our candidate is a very good candidate, has served in state-wide office for six years. And I think that that candidate – Inez Tenenbaum – has a chance of winning, but in order for her to win, she has to be a much better candidate than Jim DeMint.
Graham: He starts with an advantage just in terms of the vote counts.
Fowler: Jim DeMint is a Republican, he has a margin of six or eight points, and it takes a lot to overcome that. You can say, “Well, if you’ve got eight points, you’re going to have to change four percent of the people’s minds and you’ll win.” That’s a lot.
Graham: You’re back to financing, raising money, targeting audiences…
Fowler: Democrats can win, though I tell you it’s tough.
Graham: Well, a competitive two-party system is certainly one of the ideals of the political scientist.
Fowler: No question, no question. It brings all sorts of benefits, except when it falls into the disrepute that some have now because they’re so divisive and so partisan as to cause gridlock.
Graham: I think that’s one of the ideals of the West Forum – as we talked with Governor West – about the importance of really recovering or restoring a kind of healthy political competition where people, as I heard him say a bunch of times, could disagree without being disagreeable. And a lot of times, this sharp partisanship really is grating or negative in that sense disagreeable. So, maybe the work of the West Forum can at least open up to students discussion about alternatives to the kind of politics of the negative that we see now.
Fowler: I certainly would hope so. I can’t think of anybody whose image and career one could more appropriately emulate than John West. [Back to Topics]
