Aaron Sheinin and Daniel Malloy at M Vista today.
Had lunch today with my friend Aaron Sheinin of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. You may remember him from when he worked at The State.
Aaron wanted me to meet Daniel Malloy of the AJC’s Washington Bureau. Daniel’s going to be in SC a good bit over the next few months covering our presidential primaries.
Back in 1987, right after I arrived at The State as governmental affairs editor, we brought Jeff Miller in from our Newberry bureau to cover the 1988 presidential primaries full-time. Or rather, the Republican primary and the Democratic caucuses. We had other people writing about the campaign off and on, but Jeff’s job was to stay out on the hustings and cover as much of it as possible in person.
Of course, that was back when The State had five times the staff it does now. I’m sure it will be working hard to cover the 2016 contests, but it’s good to know that we can also rely on the small army of out-of-state people who will also be on the job in SC. Once, that would have done us little good, but with the Web, we can follow it all with relative ease.
I didn’t have a whole lot to share with Aaron and Daniel today. I did tell them that I think the current, early GOP field offers more palatable choices than we saw in 2012, when the selection was just awful.
And on the Democratic side… well, at this point eight years ago Hillary Clinton seemed to have SC almost sewn up. This time, I’m fairly confident she DOES have it cinched — although Dick Harpootlian, a Biden man, has been telling Aaron and Daniel otherwise.
The difference is that there’s nobody even remotely like Barack Obama on the horizon this time.
But we’ll see, won’t we? Secretary Clinton does have a talent for undermining herself…
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I apologize to Aaron for catching him with a goofy expression on his face. Doesn’t look a bit like him. They were backlit, and I couldn’t tell what I had until I got back and lightened it up. Here’s a better picture of him, with the rest of the gang, from the lunch after Lee Bandy’s funeral in 2013.
By the way, I noted at the time that only three people in that picture from 2013 still worked at the paper. Now that Neil White (in the foreground) has taken a buyout, it’s down to two.
Oh, and the next to the last person on the left-hand side of the table, right next to Mike Fitts, is Doug Pardue. I called Doug a couple of weeks back to congratulate him and the rest of the team of reporters who just won the Pulitzer for the Charleston paper.