The Importance of Political Leadership

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On Politics

The Importance of Political Leadership

On Politics

Tuesday, 02 March 2010 10:34

By all accounts President Barack Obama had a very tough first year in office. Despite having Democratic supermajorities in both the upper and lower houses of Congress, his two major policy initiatives – cap-and-trade and health care reform – crashed and burned.

Obama’s allies in the mainstream media have responded not by criticizing the president, but by blaming the American people and our structure of government. For example, Newsweek recently featured a story titled “America the Ungovernable.” And Paul Krugman, a liberal economist with a regular column in the New York Times, said “don’t blame Mr. Obama, blame our political culture instead.”

As Charles Krauthammer recently noted, however, this is nonsense. President Ronald Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to close dozens of special tax loopholes in order to lower taxes for everyone across the board. And a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, collaborated with Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to take on the culture of intergenerational dependency and eliminated welfare as an entitlement.

Krauthammer’s point is that our country’s current problems are not rooted in its governmental structure or in its people’s widely divergent views, but in its lack of good political leadership. Reagan and Clinton provided such leadership; Obama simply hasn’t.

As the State Senator for Beaufort County, I recently had a front-row seat in seeing how such leadership can overcome partisan differences. For over a year, Republican and Democratic legislators in the Palmetto State have been locked in a bitter debate over whether a person, when he presents himself to vote, must provide a valid and current photo ID.

I strongly believe that such is absolute necessary to ensure the integrity of our electoral process. First, the evidence suggests that attempts at voter fraud are increasing. On October 6, 2008, the New York Times – hardly a right-wing rag – reported that about 400,000 ACORN filings had been rejected by authorities as duplicates, incomplete, or fraudulent. Think about that, and then think about the recent elections that have been decided by bizarrely slim margins.

Second, there seems to be a new “winning at all costs” subculture taking root. A few days before the Massachusetts special senate election, the host of a program on MSNBC said this: “I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts, I'd try to vote ten times. I don't know if they'd let me or not, but I'd try to. Yeah, that's right, I'd cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. Because that's exactly what they are.”

The League of Women Voters disagrees with me, arguing in a piece recently published in this newspaper that such would disenfranchise voters, that obtaining a photo ID would be expensive, that lines would be longer at the polls, and that there is no evidence that voter fraud currently exists.

For a long time, the debate between Republicans and Democrats in the Statehouse in Columbia proceeded largely along these lines. Yet a few weeks ago, the State Senate passed the South Carolina Elections Reform Act – a bill that requires a person to present a current and valid photo ID at the polls – by a bipartisan vote of 44 to 2.

And it happened because the Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, the leading Republican, and Minority Leader John Land, the leading Democrat, stepped up and showed personal leadership.

For his part, Land acknowledged that a voter photo ID would decrease election fraud and increase ballot security. And McConnell conceded that a voter photo ID requirement should be deferred until 2012 so that the state election commission had enough time to identify all voters without photo IDs and to advise them that an ID was available free of charge.

McConnell and Land then tasked four senators – two from each political party – with revising the bill to reflect these understandings. I had the privilege of serving on that drafting committee and we got the job done. They then went to their respective caucuses and successfully explained why the bill, as revised, was good for the people of South Carolina.

The debate in the State Senate over a voter photo ID requirement was every bit as passionate as the debate over cap-and-trade and health care reform in Congress – or the debates over Reagan’s tax cuts or Clinton’s welfare reform. And in each instance the difference between success and failure, between doing the people’s business and politics as usual, was leaders honestly listening to opponents’ points of view and then trying in good faith to address their concerns.

In our nation’s capital, Reagan listened to Bradley and Clinton listened to Gingrich, and our country benefited. In Columbia, McConnell listened to Land, and South Carolinians will get a solid reform law that ensures the integrity of our elections without disenfranchising anyone. These are examples of political leadership making a difference, and we could sure use some of that in Washington right now.

Tom Davis is the State Senator for Beaufort County

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Margaret Evans -
	Margaret Evans is the Editor of Lowcountry Weekly. She has been writing her regular column "Rants & Raves" for the better part of a decade, which is a lot of bloviating for someone who's not an expert. On anything.Read More >>