If you’re not sleeping in tomorrow morning, you might want to listen to Weekend Edition on NPR. I taped an interview with Don Gonyea this morning about the 1st Congressional District special election. [Update: You can listen to the interview here.]
That is, it was sort of about the 1st Congressional District special election.
Earlier in the week, I got a call from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wanting to interview me about that race, and I begged off. I told them I just hadn’t been following it that closely.
When Brigid McCarthy called from NPR, I told her the same. But she said what they really wanted to do is talk about Mark Sanford.
That, I said, I can do.
And that’s mostly what we talked about.
But just in case, I did some reading up on the contest so I’d have a broad familiarity with it, in the event that we went beyond Sanford (which we did, a bit). That’s what led to this earlier blog post.
To update y’all from that post…
It’s looking to me like the GOP candidate running the hardest other than Sanford is Larry Grooms. Hogan Gidley, the former SC Republican Party executive director who in recent years has been associated with Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, has been sending me releases this week for Grooms, including one yesterday noting that Jeff Duncan and Mick Mulvaney (two of Tim Scott’s fellow Tea Party classmates of 2010) have endorsed him. And like Sanford, Grooms released a TV ad this week.
But then, maybe some of the other candidates are running just as hard, but don’t have my email address. If you’re out there, it’s brad@bradwarthen.com.
Also, I’ve sort of been operating on the assumption that the winner of the GOP contest will likely be Scott’s replacement, rather than Stephen Colbert’s sister. Republicans have held that seat since Tommy Hartnett won it on Reagan’s coattails in 1980. But… in 2008, the Democratic nominee came within a couple of points of winning. That was another coattails situation, though, in this case Barack Obama’s. There won’t be any Obama coattails operating this spring.
More than that, I checked this morning with someone who was fairly intimately involved in the most recent reapportionment. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the district is now safer for Republicans than it was in 2008.
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You’re sayin’ Stephen Colbert’s coattails are not as long as the President of the United States’?
Bravo, Brad- just heard you on NPR.
Brad, you should have corrected him. Sanford pointedly DIDN’T resign. Otherwise, nice job!
http://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-saturday/
That would have been ungentlemanly, since I was a guest.
But truly, I didn’t hear him say it. Maybe when that was when I whipped off the headphones for a couple of seconds to remove my sweater vest. It was warm in the studio.
It was in the intro and in the lead-in question.
OK, then — chalk it up to me thinking about what I was going to say, instead of listening. Men are prone to that failing, and I probably am more than others. I’m not proud of it, but I know I do that about myself…
He said Sanford resigned twice – at the beginning and on into the interview. It was a good interview but that error told me he didn’t do his homework.
The online version corrected it. I don’t think that was what he meant though.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/23/172756975/recovering-from-scandal-mark-sanford-eyes-political-return
Correction Feb. 23, 2013
A previous headline incorrectly named Mark Warner as the candidate. The audio of this story, as well as a previous Web version, also did not make clear that he resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association, not as governor.