Did this story get your dander up? It did mine, but I have an easily-elevated dander when it comes to political parties and their foolishness.
It’s bad enough that the S.C. Democrats are talking about moving their primary, but not moving it to the same early date as the Republicans.
It’s worse that the party hides behind the phony ruse of "inviting" the Republicans to move their primary later in order to save the taxpayers a million bucks they wouldn’t have to pay if the Democrats, as long as they’re moving, would just go ahead and move to the same date the GOP has already staked out. If I were a Republican, I’d really get a chuckle out of that. As the committed UnPartisan that I am, it just really, really annoys me.
It’s even worse than that to see S.C. Democrats be so servile to the national party that they don’t have the guts to ask for something that they believe the national party doesn’t want them to ask for, even when the thing they ought to be asking for would save S.C. taxpayers a million bucks. It’s hard to imagine anything that would more dramatically emphasize that the whims of the national Democratic Party are more important to the current leadership of the S.C. Democratic Party than the material and political interests of the people of South Carolina. (This isn’t how you grow a party, people — in case you have any interest in that.)
But the thing that truly disgusts me is the suggestion, at the end of story, that the party would even consider repeating the unpardonable sin that the S.C. Republicans committed back in 1994 — of putting a completely bogus, meaningless, yet politically divisive, referendum question on the primary ballot as a cheap trick to hype the party’s primary.
In 1994, it was the Confederate flag. Not that the GOP leadership gave a damn one way or the other about the flag; they just wanted to draw angry white males into choosing a GOP ballot. This time, it would be "to ask primary voters if they believe President Bush should be impeached" — as if it would mean anything to have such a vote.
Let’s just hope Carol Khare Fowler was humoring this Mike Evatt guy by saying she would look into the feasibility of such a mock-referendum question. Humoring such nonsense would be bad enough, but it would stop short of obscene. That GOP flag "referendum" has long stood as the most outrageous thing I’ve seen a political party do in the last two decades in South Carolina. It’s a profound shame that any Democrat in our state would even contemplate trying to match it.
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That’s why I voted for Nader in 2000 and why he’s one of my heroes. The Democrats argued that he took votes away from Gore. Nader saw the bigger picture of reforming government and making it better.
BTW, his book “17 Traditions” is outstanding.