Phil, me and Wesley — closing out the final show.
Last night, I was the very last guest on the very last show of Pub Politics. I was the big finale.
And that was fitting, since it was my ninth appearance on the show, and no one else has even come close to that record. For those of you struggling with the math, that’s almost twice the standard for SNL’s Five-Timers Club.
The show isn’t yet available for watching online, but I’ll give you a heads-up when it’s up.
The first guest was Matt Moore, the new chairman of the SC Republican Party. He was followed by Joel Sawyer (sometime host of the show) and Amanda Alpert Loveday, executive director of the SC Democratic Party.
At the very end, Wesley asked me whether I had any final words with which to close the show. I told him that I wanted to thank him and his Democratic opposite number (Wesley Donehue does work for the Senate Republicans, Phil Bailey for the Senate Democrats) for providing a forum in which people from the two camps can sit down, have a beer, and discuss politics in a lively, frank manner with (relative) civility. It may not sound like much, but there aren’t that many such forums these days.
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Sometimes the sidebar discussions are more interesting than what happens on the air. Before we went on, I went up to say hey to Joel Sawyer. About two seconds later, Joel said, “You’re not going to congratulate me, are you?”
What he meant was, congratulate him for helping Mark Sanford get elected back to Congress.
I said that alas, no, I could not congratulate him for that. Only maybe I left out the “alas.”
This would no doubt seem ungracious on my part, to most observers. After all, if someone you know has won a big election since the last time you saw him, the usual thing is to congratulate him. He knew that; I knew that. My failure/refusal to do so stuck out a mile, from the first seconds of our interaction.
But I just could not honestly do so. Alas.
And everyone went back to their day jobs of smearing their opponents.