This just popped up over on Tim Cameron’s site, The Shot:
We have heard from multiple sources that high level state and national
Republican leaders are currently in the process of recruiting SCGOP Chairman Katon Dawson to run against Sen. Lindsey Graham in next year’s Republican Primary.
Those "high level state and national
Republican leaders" must be the "Make Lindsey Graham a Senator for Life" committee. Katon’s a nice fella, but I’ve never heard him exhibit any kind of knowledge, expertise or even interest in any issue other than that he likes being a Republican a whole lot and thinks the whole world should feel the same way.
So somebody wants to run him against possibly the smartest, most knowledgeable, principled, hard-working member of the United States Senate?
Somebody’s pulling Tim’s leg. Either that, or ol’ Lindsey just got his luckiest break since the federal grand jury reported indictments last week.
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>> So somebody wants to run him against
>> possibly the smartest, most knowledgeable,
>> principled, hard-working member of the
>> United States Senate?
I thought you said he was running against Lindsey Grahmnesty?
Lindsey should start preparing to save his political life. For a supposedly smart guy, he made one of the dumbest purely political moves a U.S. Senator could make.
He and McCain are now as irrelevant as the immigration bill. Sorry, time to find some new heroes.
Despite grabbing as much face time as possible on the national media stage, Lindsey has been upstaged by the quiet man, Jim Demint, who has proven that hard work, perserverence, and commitment to principle will win over politics most times. If the national and state GOP “thinkers” have thought that Katon is “the man”, well then, we are right to suspect that our leaders are truly out of touch. Yegads!
Nah, see, you misspelled his name Chas… that’s probably where the confusion comes in.
And a guy leading a mob wielding pitchforks is hardly a quiet man. Although Jim was that up to now.
I wonder what caused him to abandon prudence and jump out in front of the mob on this one? It’s an interesting thing to contemplate. Did he finally get fed up with Lindsey getting all the attention, and say, “I’ll grab the glory on this one, and take him down a notch, too?”
Maybe not. I have a handicap on this issue, when it comes to understanding the folks who took down this bill. It’s hard for me to believe they’re so passionate about it, because after all this time, I still don’t really understand why they WOULD be so passionate about it. Makes me suspicious.
In any case, this new populist-demagogue stance of Sen. DeMint’s just doesn’t seem at all like the guy I thought I knew. You learn something every day, I guess.
Lindsey McGraham Having A Very, Very Bad June
From dumplindseygraham.blogspot.com
It really wasn’t all that long ago that Lindsey Graham was in the cat bird’s seat. He ran for the US Senate as a strong bible-belt conservative, and South Carolinians took the bait, hook, line, and sinker, as they say. He got lots of TV time during Slick Willie’s impeachment, and the mainstream media, especially the flaming liberals over at CNN, were intrigued. Who, they asked, is this hokey, effeminate Republican Senator, a confirmed-bachelor, military veteran (not a blood-thirsty killer, but a desk-jockey lawyer, so we can still love him), and raised behind a beer joint in Central, SC?
Over the next few months, Lindsey Graham became a drive-by media darling, a cable news rock star. How? Well, he basically turned to all those conservative folks in South Carolina, who elected him and sent him to Washington to represent their views and principles, and gave them the middle-finger salute. Mr. Graham decided that he’d rather be a DC insider, a “player”, than a rock-solid conservative representative of the good people of South Carolina. So, Mr. Graham told the good people of South Carolina to kiss his ass.
It happened quickly. First, Mr. Graham injected himself into the terrorism debate following 9/11. How? By fighting, and pleading passionately on the floor of the Senate, for the rights of terrorists, the cold-blooded killers of American children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. He argued that these murderers, who worship a God that tells them to destroy America by killing every last one of its citizens, should have the exact same rights as those citizens in a court of law. Did he weep for America’s children? Never even a misty eye from Mr. Graham for Americans, or the South Carolinians who elected him. He was fighting, pleading, begging for the rights of terrorists, and CNN and the rest of the liberal media felt a stir in their collective loins. And back in South Carolina, his office phones lit up. The folks who elected Lindsey were pissed. And I mean, really pissed. Graham said it was only the “loud folks” making noise. And the folks over at CNN started to swoon.
Next, Mr. Graham sold his soul to the devil, John McCain. Mr. McCain believed Graham could help him to victory in the critical 2008 South Carolina Presidential Primary, and he nuzzled up to Lindsey, and Lindsey nuzzled back. Shortly thereafter, McCain and Graham were 2 of the 7 GOP members of the Gang of 14. They were locked at the hip. Graham believed he had been anointed Vice President. And back in South Carolina, they had to add capacity down at the phone company just to handle the calls to Mr. Graham’s office from those pissed off voters. They screamed into the answering machines, because Mr. Graham’s handlers had stopped answering the phone. But again, said Lindsey, it’s only the “loud” folks. Most folks support what I’m doing, said Mr. Graham. And CNN started getting that tingly feeling in their collective nether regions.
Finally, basking in the stage lights of CNN’s portable studio and feeling invincible, Lindsey made the mistake that killed his career. He was asked by John McCain to join a secret band of co-conspirators to write an Immigration bill for GW Bush, and ram it through the Senate. He and Johnny Mac went into a room, closed the door, got down on their knees, and bowed to Ted Kennedy. Then, instead of an Immigration bill, they wrote an Amnesty bill. Folks back in South Carolina went ballistic. Senator Jim DeMint came down on the side of logic and reason, and was embraced by a South Carolina electorate that, up until then, was ambivalent about him.
And what did Lindsey Graham do?
He went before LaRaza, the radical Hispanic tool of Ted Kennedy that wants to reclaim the Southwest US for Mexico (by force), and told them that he supports amnesty, that he was fighting to legalize every single criminal trespasser that exists, and he was going to tell all those “bigots” back in South Carolina to shut up. Yes, he cried big tears as he said it, and yes, CNN was there.
He stood side-by-side with Teddy “Splash” Kennedy, one of the most despicable human beings to ever walk the earth, looked at him lovingly, and said, “You are one of the most principled men I have ever met.” Yes, he really said it. I’m not making it up.
He stood on the floor of the US Senate and cried, really cried, because it appeared the immigration bill would die. He pleaded for amnesty for all the criminal trespassers. He said that not only should we legalize them all, but that they should be allowed to bring every single relative to the US as a legal citizen as well. He banged on the podium. He basically pitched a child-like fit (Michelle Malkin nicknamed him “Senator Hissy”).
And he cut off all contact with the folks back in South Carolina. No Town Hall Meetings to hear their views (Mr. DeMint, did, by the way). His offices, all of them, simply stopped answering the phone, and refused to return messages. He continued to show up on CNN and the other drive-by news outlets to say that “the majority” of folks back in South Carolina supported him, and that it was only the few “loud people” and “bigots” in South Carolina who were making all the noise. He said he was smarter than South Carolina’s voters, and that we should just trust him in DC. He told us to kiss his ass.
And CNN looked at Lindsey Graham, and declared, “This is the man I’m going to marry!”
In June 2007, though, Senator Lindsey Graham’s world began to implode, and his political career with it:
– As it turns out, there are a bunch of “loud people” in South Carolina. In a recent poll by a nationally respected firm of nearly 1000 South Carolinians, 70% said they disapprove of the job he is doing as our representative. 80% (four out of five) said they do not want the current immigration bill (The Grahamnesty Bill) passed. And an overwhelming majority of South Carolina Republicans said they want Graham to stop pandering to Democrats, and instead work to represent the conservative values of South Carolina.
– Lindsey Graham’s meal ticket is all punched out. John McCain’s presidential campaign is on life-support, his polling numbers are in free fall, the money has stopped coming in, and there are strong indications Mr. McCain will withdraw his candidacy before the end of the summer. The coat tails that Lindsey was riding are being ripped to shreds, and Mr. Graham is finding no sympathy back in South Carolina.
– Graham’s own campaign donations from inside South Carolina have effectively stopped. The staff is in panic mode. A SC GOP constituency that gave very generously to Graham’s last effort is, in effect, this time telling the Senator to kiss its collective ass.
– Mr. Graham’s Amnesty Bill is being slowly strangled by logical, patriotic heroes in the Senate, including Senator DeMint and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
– With SC Treasurer Thomas Ravenel’s indictment on drug charges, the gloves are officially off for the 2008 elections. This can only be a bad thing for a man with the littered closet of Mr. Graham.
So, Lindsey Graham, once the favorite son of South Carolina’s conservative majority, faces a much different landscape as he runs for re-election next year. The majority of South Carolinians consider him a sell-out to the liberals, a self-promoter, a pompous ass, and a bad joke. They vocally disagree with just about every position he has taken in the last eighteen months. The SC GOP is quietly but aggressively seeking a conservative opponent for the upcoming primary. His sugar daddy has gone impotent. The money has stopped flowing. And the Democrats smell blood.
It’s been a very bad June for Lindsey Graham. And it’s only going to get worse.
Maybe Lindsey should have tried a “don’t ask, don’t tell” amnesty program instead.
Here’s Lindsey’s latest comment on his failed attempt to allow illegal immigrants an easy path to citizenship…
“There’s racism in this debate. Nobody likes to talk about it, but a very small percentage of people involved in this debate really have racial and bigoted remarks. The tone that we create around these debates, whether it be rhetoric in a union hall or rhetoric on talk radio, it can take people who are on the fence and push them over emotionally,” – Senator Lindsey Graham, on the immigration bill.
And when he says “small percentage” you know he means somewhere between 70-90%.
Just admit it, Mr. Grahmnesty, you had to pay back the owners of the chicken processors, the modern day produce plantation owners, and the contruction companies.
Brad – why don’t you ask Michael Mungo whether all the workers on his job sites have documentation?
You mean Stewart. I think Michael’s retired.
Of course there’s racism in this. But I don’t believe DeMint’s a racist. Like I say, it’s interesting.
Fed Up,
Bravo! Couldn’t have said it better myself. Anybody but Graham!
Brad,
My sources are both reliable and correct. I didn’t say Katon was attempting to run. I said other people (some very important people) have been calling him trying to recruit him to run.
Let look at why somebody would do this:
1.) There are few candidates who are willing to risk their office for run against Graham; Leaving the SCGOP to run for the Senate would not be a very high level of risk (alpha) for the relative reward (beta).
2.) Katon could rapidly mobilize a 56 county grassroots organization with a month of an announcement due to issues like immigration, Group of 14 etc. that really fire up the base.
3.) Katon can raise money (but probably not as much as Graham).
I’m not saying he could win, but I am saying he is an attractive enough candidate that people will try to recruit him.
I may be in my early 20’s, but nobody is pulling my leg here.
“There are few candidates who are willing to risk their office for run against Graham; Leaving the SCGOP to run for the Senate would not be a very high level of risk (alpha) for the relative reward (beta).”
Tim,
why would a challenger have to leave the SCGOP to run against Gramnesty?
Katon is running for RNC chairman.
Despite that the party is a shambles…and the republican government is run like a bang of drunken sailors…he think he can propell himself to the top.
Brad, Graham is NOT the most knowledgeable, smartest or hard-working member of the senate. And he CERTAINLY is not the most principled. He must be defeated next year, and I believe he will be by a landslide margin. I don’t know who Katon Dawson is, but if he runs he’s got my vote. If he doesn’t and no other republican challenger runs, I’ll vote for the democrat. I am absolutely determined to do whatever I can to make sure Grahamnesty goes home to his upstate law practice next year as an ex-senator. Ed
Tim, I’m sure your soures are both reliable and correct, but Brad lives in this strange world of his own, in which the fact that his opinion is shared by no one is unimportant.
When I first read his remark, I said to myself, why is Katon Dawson going to run against Barbara Boxer? She’ll slaughter him. And why do people from South Carolina care what happens in a California Senate race?
Then I realized that Brad believes that it is really possible to think of Lindsey Graham as “the smartest, most knowledgeable, principled, hard-working member of the United States Senate” without injuring yourself laughing. Sometimes Brad doesn’t understand that there are millions of people in America, and they have their own ideas.
You may not dismiss Graham with the remarks that appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” some time back, in which Stephen said “Lindsey is a girl’s name” and the graphic added “and Graham is a cracker”, but surely no one except Brad describes Lindsey Graham in the terms used above.
And Graham is going to face a serious challenge, because he spat in the fact of the vast majority of his constituency. It doesn’t surprise me that he did that; what surprises me is that anyone is surprised by it. Graham and the Republican leadership fundamentally do not care about the people who vote for them; they only care about the people who give them large campaign donations. In that group, there is a small number of big donors who are vitally interested in opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants in order to increase the supply of workers and thereby depress wages.
You hear this constant whine that “illegal immigrants do jobs Americans won’t.” Oh yeah? You offering a million dollars a year for these jobs? Then shut up. I read in the papers periodically about growers not being able to get field workers. I want to say to them, the purpose of U.S. immigration policy is not to provide you with a supply of low wage workers.
The proposed guest worker program was awful, it allowed bringing in guest workers without requiring an employer to pay the prevailing wage. So, wages to high? Bring in some illegals to force wages down. Wages still too high? Bring in more.
You can tell what the people behind this bill are thinking when one of them talks about “the people who tend our lawns and raise our children”
Show of hands. How many of you hire illegal aliens to tend your lawn?
How many of you tend your own lawn?
How many of you hire illegal aliens to look after your children?
How many of you look after your own children?
Yeah, Graham wants the votes of the people who oppose this bill, and he’ll lecture them and lecture them in misleading terms, constantly talking about how we are a country of immigrants (yeah, legal immigrants)and how these people just want to come into our country and work (yeah, and a bank robber just wants to come into the bank and make a withdrawal).
But you don’t need to listen to him, because he doesn’t care about you. He only cares about the people who want to bring in more illegal aliens so they can pay less money to the people who “tend our lawns and look after our children”
Well said Hal! You’ve got my vote. Most common democrats disagree with this illegal mass migration and the devastating effect it has been having on American workers, yet the politicians refuse to enforce the law. We need new Democratic Party leadership with the guts to stand up for their constituents.
Lex,
He doesn’t have to leave, but if he ran and lost I think he would be presured into stepping down afterwards.
“but I’ve never heard him exhibit any kind of knowledge, expertise or even interest in any issue other than that he likes being a Republican a whole lot and thinks the whole world should feel the same way.”
For a second there, I thought you had the two mixed up and were describing Lindsey Graham.
What Graham doesn’t realize is that he votes for what he thinks Bush wants him to vote for, not his constituents. Graham needs to start listening to the people of South Carolina and stop worrying about kissing George Bush’s ass.
Brad,
“a guy leading a mob wielding pitchforks is hardly a quiet man.” – well maybe DeMint is not so quiet on a big national issue that a small group of senators attempted to dominate without giving everyone a fair chance to amend the bill.
Is it prudent to ram a bad bill through the Senate without following the normal legislative process? I would submit no. DeMint was not the one being imprudent. The only reason he was able to bring this bill down was because the Grand Bargainers imprudently denied other Senators their normal rights to influence the final legislative product.
No. I don’t think DeMint did not do this out of misguided jealousy of Graham’s media exposure.
If Jim DeMint is a populist, then Brad Warthen is an elitist.
Name calling never gets us anywhere Brad.
Gosh, Brad, the trees really have you screened from the forest on this one. You’ve called Lindsey Graham the best of the Senate bunch and Jim DeMint “a guy leading a mob wielding pitchforks.”
That’s beyond the pale in one-sidedness for an editorial page editor, but, hey, you’re the one who has to live life on the blog and also somewhere in the A section, not me.
Sometimes, you’re just so wrong you can’t dig deep enough to hide. You’ve been there from the beginning on the immigration bill, and Ravenel, and …
How’s that work? Endorse them, give them first-name familiarity on the blog and then distance yourself on the editorial page once the indictment comes down?
Priceless.
Oh, Tim’s right. People ARE saying that. And again, I think Katon’s a fine fella.
There’s just a fairly obvious absurdity to the situation that is lost on a LOT of people.
And while we’re talking unlikely opponents for Sen. Graham — check out the op-ed piece we have coming up this weekend from Andre Bauer. It seems that, suddenly and without warning, he’s been doing some “hard thinking” about global issues. I am not making this up.
Andre certainly would be an improvement over Grahamnesty!
The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back for the GOP
Brown people speaking Meskin.
The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back for the GOP
Brown people speaking Meskin.
The idea of either GovLite or Mr. Dawson trying to go head-to-head with Dick Lugar on foreign policy, John Warner on national defense, or Ted Kennedy on health care is so comical I almost split my sides laughing. SC would really find out what being in the political wilderness is all about.