True leaders don't run 'job scared'

With friends like each other, do Lindsey Graham and John McCain need political enemies in this state?

With so many politicians who pander, don't we need more, like Graham and McCain, who don't?

Over the last two years, lots of right-leaning South Carolinians have gotten right riled up about "comprehensive immigration reform" Senate bills that conservative Republicans McCain and Graham helped craft with notoriously liberal Democrats Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid. Those bills, inaccurately branded as "amnesty" deals, didn't make it through the legislative process.

And if some conservative folks in these parts could have their way, South Carolina's senior senator wouldn't make it through the 2008 election year to a second term — and Arizona's senior senator would not win the Jan. 19 South Carolina GOP primary.

A dump-Graham insurgency wanted to draft Thomas Ravenel as a potentially formidable 2008 Senate primary challenger before he was indicted in June on drug charges (he later resigned and has pleaded guilty to one cocaine count). Lexington orthodontist Buddy Witherspoon, Graham's current long-shot primary opponent, has predictably charged that the incumbent "knowingly supported issues that are against the will of South Carolinians."

Nearly four decades ago, another S.C. senior senator, Strom Thurmond, helped Richard Nixon win the GOP presidential nomination, South Carolina's eight electoral votes and the White House. "Ol Strom" — he was already 65 — also helped South Carolina escape the ignominy of joining Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas as the only states carried by George Wallace in the 1968 general election.

Graham would be the first to tell you that he's no Thurmond — and that McCain's no Nixon. So why is McCain campaigning here with, and airing a radio-ad testimonial from, the man Rush Limbaugh called "Lindsey Grahamnesty"?

After all, McCain's already got S.C. endorsements from Attorney General Henry McMaster, Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell and House Speaker Bobby Harrell.

Gov. Mark Sanford, a congressman when he backed McCain's 2000 presidential bid, isn't endorsing anybody. Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer told me Thursday that it's a "time commitment" call: "He's focusing more on being a governor and on being a dad."

Graham, meanwhile, is focused on boosting McCain's resurgent run, stressing McCain's foresight in urging the now-promising "surge" in Iraq when polls were against it — and when other GOP candidates were demurring on it.

During a visit to this newspaper a few weeks ago, Graham dismissed the notion that he's doing more harm than good: "The people who don't like me already don't like McCain."

They don't like the Graham-McCain immigration collaboration, either. Two months ago, a letter to this newspaper, echoing a familiar theme, cited that gripe while warning: "Time is running out for Republicans to wake up and decide they need someone to replace Sen. Lindsey Graham."

A mere two days ago, another letter, while not mentioning Graham, advocated this action against the "hordes of illegals": "Personally, I would like to see a politician with enough backbone to round up every one of them and give them the boot."

"Backbone" wouldn't suffice for that mammoth task: If we could "round up" enough of "them" across the nation every day to fill the North Charleston Coliseum (10,000 or so), it would take more than three years to get "every one."

Then again, we can't and won't. If we could and did, we would devastate the U.S. economy.

Yes, we need sweeping immigration transformation. We could have had it with this year's "comprehensive" bill, which would have created long-term paths to citizenship (not "amnesty") for illegal immigrants who met assorted requirements, including paying fines, learning English and keeping a job.

As Graham told us during his recent drop-in: "I know border security's important, but I also know you don't build a wall to solve this problem, and that 12 million people won't vanish."

But most lawmakers' willingness to call it like they see it does eventually vanish in their pursuit of protracted power.

Not Graham: "I may at the end of the day be wrong, but it's my day job to look at the facts. It's not to try to mold what I find into the easiest political answer. It would drive me crazy to try to figure out the most popular position on every issue."

He accepts the risks that come with that approach: "The job of anybody in government is to speak truth to power, and the power in democracy is the voter."

Yet he added: "I'm not job scared."

Neither is McCain, who aggravates plenty of conservatives on not just immigration but campaign-finance reform (he pushes it) and waterboarding (he wants to ban it).

So don't fall for politicians who tell you what you want to hear. We already have a surplus of them.

Our pressing shortage lies in the ranks of politicians — like Graham and McCain— who are brave enough to tell you what they really think.

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.