Gowdy goes to Washington

By Charles Sowell  

NOVEMBER 16, 2010 8:18 a.m. (0)

You can almost see Jimmy Stewart in his role as Jefferson Smith smiling in the background when Trey Gowdy talks about his plans as the newly minted Congressman from the 4th District.

On a surface level, at least, there are seeming similarities between Gowdy’s vision of his role as a congressman and the naïveté of the Boy Ranger leader turned senator portrayed by Stewart in “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.”

Certainly, there is dead-ringer likeness between Gowdy and the movie character in passion for ideals and it was ideals that propelled Gowdy to his stunningly one-sided victory over veteran congressman Bob Inglis in the June primary runoff.

Inglis went down by a 71 percent to 29 percent margin.

Harold Watson Gowdy III is called Trey for the Roman numeral tagged onto his name. Gowdy was planning to step down as Solicitor in the 7th Circuit when he decided to run for Congress.

“I knew I was going to be looking for a job and since Bob’s voting record seemed so at odds with the values in the district, I decided to run,” he said.

There were other reasons in that calculation, like the perception that Washington had changed Inglis, who, at the time of his defeat, had served six terms. Gowdy says he plans to change Washington and not let the town change him.

Hugely popular in Spartanburg and Union counties as a tough and effective prosecutor with a passion for victims, Gowdy said his reason for leaving the solicitor’s post was simple.

“I got really sick of seeing children on autopsy tables,” he said during a wide-ranging interview at the Starbucks in downtown Greenville.

That kind of essential humanity kept bubbling to the surface during the course of the interview; seemingly at odds with today’s bare knuckles political world and the bruising primary battle Gowdy came through on the road to winning the Nov. 2 vote. Originally, Gowdy faced not only Inglis and three other challengers on the road to a primary runoff.

Coming out of that battle were a certain number of misperceptions about Gowdy, he said. Foremost among them was that he won against Inglis based on tea party support.

“I am not tea party. Certainly the tea party supported me against Bob and I’m grateful for that support but originally I faced two tea party candidates in the primary and I’m still catching flack on local talk radio for not being conservative enough for some in that movement,” he said.

He considers himself a mainstream conservative and says he’s open to discussion on some of the issues that face the nation.

“I try to weigh the evidence, all of the evidence,” he said.

That doesn’t extend to things like voting to raise the debt ceiling, which will come up in the 112th Congress.

“If that means shutting down the government, so be it,” Gowdy said.

The looming battle is likely to define the Republican Party in the coming cycle with many GOP leaders in the House and Senate uneasy about the prospects of fallout from a shutdown having similar effects to the shutdown in the middle 1990s that propelled Bill Clinton to re-election.

Likewise earmarks are on Gowdy’s non-negotiable list even if it means proposals to deepen Charleston harbor go unfunded.

One of Gowdy’s planned targets is secret money flowing into campaigns through third parties who are not required to disclose their donor lists.

“Transparency is essential to campaigns and governments and I’d support changes toward that end,” he said.

Gowdy is a great admirer of Sen. Jim DeMint and many of his positions mirror those of the state’s junior senator. His undergraduate degree is from Baylor University and he’s an attorney with a degree from the University of South Carolina Law School who takes a conservative approach on Constitutional issues. But that doesn’t mean Gowdy doesn’t understand the other side of the equation.

“My Con(stitutional) Law professor at USC was way over to the left,” Gowdy said. “But we managed to work out a relationship.

“I remember once being stuck in an airport with Dick Riley (while he was secretary of Education in the Clinton Administration). The flights to Greenville had been canceled because of the weather. Both of us wanted very much to get home.

“At one point someone from the airline offered Dick a seat on a flight to Columbia and Dick told them he wasn’t going ‘without my friend here.’”

They took the flight into Columbia and Gowdy rented a car at the airport and drove Riley back home to Greenville.

“We talked about politics all the way,” Gowdy said.

To this day he counts Riley as a friend. Relationships are crucial to Gowdy most especially within his own family.

Gowdy was born in Greenville and spent his early years in a little house on North Main while his father (Harold Watson Gowdy II) was working on his residency in pediatrics in the early 1960s.

“My dad grew up dirt poor in Florence County. His father was an alcoholic and my grandmother had to support a family of five on a teacher’s salary,” Gowdy said.

Those kinds of memories, transferred down from father to son shaped Gowdy’s belief system and his rock-like faith in personal principals.

“So long as you have personal principals then you will be all right no matter what happens in your life.

“If it works out that I’m a one-term congressman, I can live with that,” Gowdy said.