The best governor in America - and you've never heard of him - Richard W Riley

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1986 by Jack Hitt

THE BEST GOVERNOR IN AMERICA-- and you've never heard of him

The needy have found some unusual sanctuaries recently--USA for Africa, Hands Across America--but none more peculiar than South Carolina, one of the most politically conservative states in the country: the state that fired the first shot in the Civil War, the state where a judge recently sentenced a rapist to castration, the state that historian C. Vann Woodward called the "historic firebrand of violent extremism,' the state whose chief justice is nicknamed "Bubba.'

In South Carolina, social issues such as education and health care have found an unlikely welcoming committee of business executives, community leaders, chambers of commerce, and even the state's conservative voters. In 1984, this coalition convinced the state legislature to raise taxes to fund a $213 million overhaul of its backward public school system. In 1985, a similar coalition pressured the legislature to allow an additional 42,000 of the state's poor onto the welfare rolls and to create a $15 million program to pay for the health care of those who can't afford insurance but make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.

Ask anyone around South Carolina who's really responsible for the change, and they'll tell you it's the Democratic governor, Dick Riley. Plagued in his twenties by a degenerative bone disease, Riley, now 53, was left with a fused spine that keeps him forever leaning forward as if he were about to fall. Although he is said to play a wicked hand of poker, he is a straight arrow out of a Frank Capra movie. In his nasal voice, he affectionately calls everyone he meets "Bud.'

A lawyer from Greenville, the governor is no cunning hick. Nor is he Huey Long. At a time when many governors resemble Phil Donahue, Riley is refreshingly dull. His speeches are filled with facts, goals, and timetables and topped with a little poetry, such as the last couplet from Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled.' He is Pat Caddell's worst nightmare.

His talents, both friends and enemies agree, are his unusual honesty and his tenacity; he is open but tough. Riley is not an arm twister. He tweaks people's consciences. He talks principle. And when he wants an issue to go his way badly enough, he gleefully wades into the swamp at which so many politicians balk: the voters.

As slick as cornbread

In 1984, the issue Riley badly wanted to have go his way was education reform. A year earlier, the legislature had voted down a reform package. So Riley reconsidered his approach and came up with a textbook strategy for how to pass progressive legislation in conservative times.

Armed with polls showing that South Carolinians were willing to pay higher taxes for education reform, Riley went to the state's top businessmen for support. He appealed to their pocketbooks: unskilled, often illiterate laborers are bad for commerce, the governor told them, and they scare away new business. After he found nearly three dozen business leaders who agreed with him, Riley put them on a commission. He asked them to come up with ideas, while a counterpart "technical' commission--mostly educators--worked out details. Some of those details required horse trading. For example, Riley wanted a merit pay system for teachers. The idea's natural enemies were the state teachers unions, the South Carolina Education Association (SCEA), and the Palmetto State Teachers Association. To gain their support, Riley knew he would have to offer salary increases, but they were opposed by the business community. Riley hammered out a compromise. In exchange for union support of merit pay, Riley got the business community to endorse a 16 percent pay raise that would bring the traditionally low South Carolina teachers' salaries in line with the regional average.

By the fall of 1983, the Education Improvement Act (EIA) was on paper but headed for the House, where anything associated with a tax increase faced immediate defeat. Even with the business community on Riley's side, only 13 of the 124 House members supported him. So Riley took his case to the voters, mounting an election campaign with EIA as the sole candidate. His staff mailed out thousands of copies of the plan and sent do-it-yourself letters-to-the-editor kits to the voters. The staff also set up a toll-free number so citizens could call in their complaints and ideas, and phone banks so constitutents could harass their representatives and senators. Supporters contributed $100,000 to pay for EIA ads; soon televisions in homes across the state were filled with images of pregnant mothers, bluecollar workers, and pin-striped executives confessing they feared for their children unless the state improved the education system.

In one three-week stretch that fall, Riley, the father of four, pushed his reform package in more than 100 speeches. At seven rallies in high school auditoriums around the state, Riley told 13,000 South Carolinians the ugly numbers: one-third of South Carolina's students couldn't pass the state's basic skills test; South Carolina ranked 49th out of the 50 states in spending per pupil; most South Carolina prisoners and unemployed were illiterate. "When you're dead and gone, what do you want to leave your children?' Riley asked at the end of one of his speeches, stirring the crowd with his home-baked cornbread rhetoric. "I say to you, as far as Dick Riley is concerned, I'd rather leave my children and their children the possibility of a quality education than the biggest house in South Carolina.'