South Carolina: Ex-Governor Advances

By Marcus Mabry, Ben Werschkul, Channon Hodge, Pedro Rafael Rosado and Alyssa KimSanford’s Political Comeback: The Times’s Kim Severson on Mark Sanford’s runoff win and re-entry into politics, three years after he was plagued by political scandal as governor of South Carolina.

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South Dakota Senator Won’t Run Again

“I will be 68 years old at the end of this term and it’s time for me to say goodbye,” Mr. Johnson said during a brief news conference in Vermillion, S.D. After thanking his family and staff he added: “The Bible says that there is a time for every season under heaven. It is now our season to spend more time with our six grandchildren and in the state we love.”

Mr. Johnson’s decision, coming on the heels of a spate of retirement announcements from Democrats, opens up a potential new opportunity for Republicans in the state that President Obama lost by a large margin last year. Further, the retirement of Mr. Johnson, a moderate who is chairman of the powerful banking committee, will open up that slot, should Democrats maintain a majority. His replacement could be critical as Congress continues to deal with regulatory issues.

Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, all Democrats, have said they will not seek re-election. Two Republicans, Senators Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, have also said they will not run.

Republicans, who are hoping that 2014 will finally be their year after two opportunities to take back the Senate majority have slipped from their fingers, are eying Mr. Johnson’s seat eagerly.

“South Dakota voters rejected the liberal agenda by nearly 20 points in 2012, and it’s a prime pick-up opportunity for Republicans regardless of whose name ends up on the ballot,” said Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Former Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, had already planned to challenge Mr. Johnson. Another possible contender would be Representative Kristi Noem, who came in on a Republican wave in 2010.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, thanked Mr. Johnson for making his decision early enough to allow his party to mount a strong defense of the seat.

Mr. Johnson’s success has been a thing of wonder since almost the beginning of his Senate career. After serving in the House for five terms, Mr. Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1996, winning by two percentage points in an expensive race for the low-cost state.

In 2002 he ran again, beating John Thune (who went on to win a Senate seat in 2004) by a mere 524 votes of more than 330,000 cast, and focused largely on agricultural issues, taking moderate positions along an array of issues.

In 2006, just a month after ascending to new powers with his party’s victory, he suffered a brain hemorrhage from which he struggled to recover, threatening his party’s fragile majority. In 2008 he ran again and won after proving that, with slurred speech and the frequent use of a scooter to ferry him around the Capitol, he could still manage his Senate career.

Among Democrats in South Dakota who could succeed him, the greatest speculation centers on Mr. Johnson’s son Brendan and former Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who was defeated by Ms. Noem and has kept a relatively low profile since but remains popular in the state.

“I’ve not discussed in detail what comes next, whether it’s Stephanie or Brendan or whatever,” Mr. Johnson said, in response to questions about whom he would like to see succeed him.

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South Carolina House Panel to Hear Ethics Complaints Against Governor

Thursday, she faces a State House ethics hearing over whether she blurred the lines between her work as a legislator and her work as a hospital fund-raiser and a business development consultant with an engineering firm.

From the Republican governor’s perspective, the hearing is just more of the same: attacks by Democrats and the Republican Party old guard who resent her Tea Party-style efforts to change government and the fact that she is a woman and a minority in a state that has had relatively few of either in positions of power.

For those who pushed for the hearing — most notably John Rainey, one of the most powerful Republican fund-raisers in South Carolina — it is a step in a long-fought battle to prove that the governor has been less than transparent and improperly mixed her governing duties and her business enterprises.

For many voters in South Carolina, however, the hearing is not much more than another twist in the state’s bare-knuckled brand of politics based on personal grudges and its history of conflict between governors and legislators.

“Unfortunately, it is being perceived as politics as usual,” said Robert W. Oldendick, a professor at the University of South Carolina who is director of the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research. “Unless there’s a smoking gun that hasn’t been revealed, a week from now we’ll say there was a little damage done to the governor.”

The Republican-heavy House Ethics Committee will not call Ms. Haley to testify during the two days it examines the issues, but her lawyer will present her case.

On the committee’s witness list are business executives and lobbyists for companies including the Lexington Medical Center and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, as well as governmental affairs experts.

They are expected to describe Ms. Haley’s role in two business deals when she was a state representative from Lexington County from 2005 until she became governor.

South Carolina lawmakers serve part-time, and most hold other jobs. One of Ms. Haley’s was to raise money for the medical center’s foundation, at a salary of $110,000 a year. The hospital wanted to open a new heart center and needed governmental approval as part of the process.

Ms. Haley maintains that her legislative efforts to support the heart center were because the hospital, which was in her district, was part of her constituency. Her other efforts to raise money for the foundation did not fall under lobbying rules, her lawyer, Butch Bowers, said.

The other issue centers on part-time consulting Ms. Haley did for Wilbur Smith Associates, an engineering firm in Columbia that paid her a total of $42,000 to help develop business. The firm had worked on a project to create a state farmers’ market.

Ms. Haley would not discuss the hearing directly, but Mr. Bowers and members of her staff have characterized it as a political witch hunt led by a man angry that Ms. Haley did not try to curry his favor to win the governorship.

In her recent memoir, Ms. Haley describes seeking Mr. Rainey’s support when she was planning her campaign. He asked to see her tax records to make sure, she said he told her, that she did not have any connections to terrorists in her background — a comment he said in later interviews that he did not recall, but dismissed as most likely a joke.

Ms. Haley, who is of Indian descent, went on to win without the support of Mr. Rainey, long an important figure in helping to bankroll political candidates in South Carolina.

“This a complaint brought by an old Republican crank who called her a terrorist and the chairman of the Democratic State Party, so it’s pretty clear,” said Tim Pearson, her chief of staff.

That Democratic chairman is Richard A. Harpootlian. He said Ms. Haley was using that explanation to present herself as the victim of political scoundrels who do not want things to change.

The political alliance might seem unlikely, but Mr. Harpootlian said he and Mr. Rainey were united in trying to hold accountable a governor they see as secretive and ethically compromised.

“Both of us have a sense that justice, no matter what the political affiliation, should prevail,” he said. “What’s clear is this governor has avoided answering the questions and has deflected every allegation as politics.”

The men filed a lawsuit last year over the same assertions. In March, a Circuit Court judge dismissed it, saying the court was not the proper venue to examine legislative ethical issues.

If the committee decides the governor did violate ethics, it could issue a reprimand or refer the case to the attorney general for criminal investigation. Most likely, Mr. Oldendick said, the hearing will only underscore what is becoming obvious to many in the state.

“For as good of a job as she did campaigning and getting elected,” he said, “her inability to relate to members of her own party in the General Assembly has been frankly surprising.”

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

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Student-Driven PAC Aims to Rebuff G.O.P. in South

At a party last month, a group in their 20s, many of them enrolled in the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, unveiled a new state and federal PAC. Called Naturally Blue, its aim is to maintain the tenuous majority of Democrats in the Arkansas legislature to promote an agenda of economic populism and to take the fight to the rest of Dixie.

In a state where Democrats suffered heavy losses in 2010, the new PAC was well received, with the party reeling in about 300 guests, including a former Democratic governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and about $13,000.

The founders believe that the economics of the South — namely its concentrated poverty — make the region “naturally blue.” Nate Looney, the PAC’s 25-year-old president, cites a report by the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta showing that 42 percent of the nation’s most impoverished children live in the South. “Yet their parents show up and vote against their best interests,” Mr. Looney argues.

His assessment notwithstanding, the South, of course, is mostly red. The legislatures of the old Confederacy are solidly Republican. All but two states — Arkansas and North Carolina — have Republican governors.

And in Arkansas, Democratic control has slipped. Fueled by anger over the health care law, voters in 2010 added two Republicans to their House delegation and retained a third, leaving one Democrat. The Republicans also picked up one of the state’s two Senate seats in 2010. In the state legislature, Republicans gained 24 seats.

Clint Reed, a former director of the Arkansas Republican Party and a public opinion consultant, said that in 2006 Democrats had a 13-point advantage over Republicans among voters in a generic Congressional race, according to his firm. Now, that number is reversed.

In Arkansas, “you’ve had, in the Democratic Party all these years, larger-than-life political figures,” said Mr. Reed, citing not only Bill Clinton but also Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, who were popular governors and senators dating to the 1970s. “They’ve always been able to keep conservative white rural voters in their tent. That coalition really crumbled in 2010.”

Now, Republican enthusiasm is so high that a record number have filed this year for state offices and have no need for an equivalent PAC, Mr. Reed said. “The Republican stuff is happening organically,” he said.

The Republican surge of 2010 inspired Naturally Blue. That September, Mr. Looney and his best friend, Will Whiting, both Democrats and Razorbacks fans, watched their football team lose what now seems like a symbolic battle against the Crimson Tide of Alabama. Dejected, the two decided that night to get in the game, at least politically.

They traveled around the country for months getting advice, meeting with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, studying redistricting maps and census data, and reaching out to Hispanic groups. The two brought in Marc Peters, 25, also of the Clinton School.

Mr. Looney, the University of Arkansas student body president in 2009, is finishing a dual degree from the Clinton School and the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law this May. Mr. Peters was the national student blog director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. And Mr. Whiting held fund-raising posts at the University of Arkansas and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Now he works for the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and knows every deep pocket in the state.

“This will be grass roots in a way that most PACs aren’t,” said Mr. Peters, referring to the “super PACs” powering this election cycle. “We’re interested in voter registration, going door to door, hosting town halls and taking on Republicans in areas where they assume they’re going to win.”

Their first move is to tackle booming northwest Arkansas, a longtime Republican bastion that is home to Walmart and Tyson Foods. They are recruiting candidates and urging them to stand their ground on economic and social justice issues like the health care overhaul. (They are less eager to engage on “wedge issues” like abortion.) The PAC’s promotional literature encourages donations from across the country, noting that “for the cost of one 30-second spot in New York, we can run seven” in Arkansas, which they see as the best staging ground for taking back the South.

Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, has seen this sort of PAC before. She says the odds are stacked against them. “A PAC like this,” she said, “is going to face a rather dark challenge if they don’t get a sugar daddy somewhere.”

That has not happened yet. Mr. Whiting, the fund-raiser, said they first wanted a swell of support to prove their viability. To help get there, Naturally Blue recently held another party in an affluent Little Rock neighborhood to mark the state’s deadline to file for political office.

Standing atop a chair at Browning’s Mexican Grill, Mr. Looney cheered the Democrats who had filed. He singled out Diana Gonzales Worthen, a Latina educator in northwest Arkansas running for the State Senate. Having studied the demographics — the district is 40 percent minority — Naturally Blue encouraged her to run. He introduced Ms. Gonzales Worthen, almost 20 years his senior, as an “up-and-coming star.”

Waging an uphill fight, the newcomers still managed to catch the attention of the Democratic old guard. “I’m only here because my law school friend David Pryor” — the former governor — “called me and said I need to get over here,” said Herb Rule, who served in the state legislature in the late 1960s and is now running for Congress in the state’s Second District.

“It’s a great idea,” he said of the PAC. “We’ll see if it works.”

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