NYT: Haley Ethics Hearing Today
Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 7:07AM Gov. of South Carolina has drawn political fire from both major political parties since the moment she took office in 2011.
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 old guard who resent her -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.”
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