Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer showed us exactly who he was over the weekend. In a speech before a group of Fountain Inn area residents, Bauer who is a Republican gubernatorial candidate drew a comparison between stray animals and people on government assistance. The Greenville News quotes Bauer as saying, “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Bauer claims to be a member of the Methodist Church. I’m not overly familiar with Methodist church doctrine but I’m fairly certain starving poor people so they won’t reproduce isn’t one of their tenants of faith. Bauer a callow man with an extremely thin professional resume revealed himself to be insensitive to the point of numbness and apparently philosophically stuck in the segregationist south where white men felt comfortable publically disrespecting poor people receiving government assistance. Beyond his obvious lack of empathy lies a complete absence of understanding about this economy and the people currently receiving government assistance. On the same day that Bauer remarks were made public South Carolina’s unemployment rate hit a record 12.6% in December. More than 6,350 South Carolinians became jobless last month. Unemployment in Allendale County reached a mind blowing 23.6%. The Department of Social Services recently reported a record number of people receiving food stamps, in the vast majority of cases; this assistance was their only source of income. There are people literally going hungry in this state and Lt. Governor Andre Bauer picks this moment in history to talk about cracking down on lazy, shiftless people on welfare.

Bauer’s response to South Carolina’s economic calamity should come as no surprise.  The knee jerk response from the Republican Party to this economic meltdown is to punish the poor and seek retribution against the unemployed. State Senator David Thomas’s plan for a mandatory drug testing program for the unemployed falls right in line with this pro-business anti worker line of thinking. In a recent letter to the editor published in The Greenville News, unemployed Greenville resident S. E. Frazier a Furman University graduate took on Thomas’s proposal with fervor, “Do you think that all people who are unemployed are functional illiterates who stay at home and smoke crack all day? I do not even drink alcohol! Why don’t Thomas and his fellow South Carolina politicians focus on job creation and education as top priorities for South Carolina instead of some cry for attention and other grandstanding techniques such as this drug testing proposal for the unemployed?”

Lawmakers in South Carolina just don’t get it. Everywhere I go I talk to people who have been hit hard by this recession, through job loss, cutbacks, rising costs and the like. Do the legislators in this state know any real people? Is everyone in their immediate families, employed and insured? There are more than 273,000 South Carolinians out of work, who are actively searching for jobs. Who speaks for them?

In response to criticism over his remarks Bauer was mostly unrepentant, calling his statements politically incorrect but necessary. Bauer expressed a desire to confront unwed mothers, “babies having babies somebody’s got to talk about. Politicians don’t want to talk about it anymore because it’s politically incorrect.” Now that’s a frank talk from South Carolina legislators that I would welcome. How about funding health clinics to provide birth control and health education to every single sexually active adolescent in our state? Let’s talk!

Bauer’s remarks while stunning are pretty true to form among conservative Republicans in our state. They’ve often punished the poor and denigrated the needy.  I’m far more concerned about allegations of fraud at the Office on Aging overseen by the Lt. Govenor.

 Since Bauer assumed responsibility for the Office on Aging in 2004, the Lt. Governor hasn’t missed an opportunity to exploit the office in an effort to burnish his reputation and visibility. Far more concerning than Bauer’s political exploitation of the government agency are his questionable financial dealings. Bauer has used the public relations firm owned by SC GOP Party chair Karen Floyd to assist in his political campaigns. Since Bauer took over management of the Office on Aging Bauer has awarded a lucrative no-bid contract to Floyd’s firm to help publicize the Senior Shield program. The Office on Aging requested and received a $105,000 grant to create the Senior Shield program, which was supposed to offer senior citizens some protection from scams by certifying businesses that paid the requested fees as senior friendly. The office was a duplication of services already provided in the private sector and has been a failure. Less than 100 businesses are certified by Senior Shield and that’s after paying Floyd’s firm $111,000. This story has gone largely unreported except by The Free Times http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=121304064644348&z_Issue_ID=11010505090911853&ShowArchiveArticle_ID=11010605093177787 and the website www.fitsnews.com

Lots of angry Democrats are running around demanding Bauer apologize for speaking from his heart, I would rather have a detailed explanation about the Senior Shield program and what’s become of our $111,000 investment in it.

 No GOP Gubanatorial hopefuls step up to repudiate Bauer…

 http://www.indigojournal.com/diary/1644/bauers-stray-animals-comments-represent-gop-orthodoxy

 Jon Stewart’s tribute to South Carolina/Andre Bauer…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/jon-stewart-blasts-gop-ca_n_436674.html