A week ago today, I dropped by a gathering of supporters of Micah Caskey at The Whig. It was a small group, but diverse — the person who had invited me to it was Raia Hirsch, a Democrat previously seen working in Vincent Sheheen’s gubernatorial campaign. (She and Micah had been in Law School together.)
I chatted briefly with Micah at the event, and he seemed quite confident that he was going to win the runoff — even though his opponent, Tem Miles, had the public backing of their chief rival in the original primary on June 14, former Lexington County Councilman Bill Banning.
Well, he was right to be confident — he won walking away, with more than two-thirds of the vote (see below). This was no doubt due to hard work, a positive message, and of course the fact that he took out a campaign ad on bradwarthen.com — that’ll do it every time. 🙂
He was a strong candidate. I guess I should say is a strong candidate, since he has opposition in the fall. In this district, you’re usually pretty safe to bet on the Republican, although I haven’t met his opposition, which I need to do at some point. He faces Democrat Peggy Butler and Constitutional candidate Robert Lampley in November.
As I think I mentioned earlier, I thought the district would have been well-served by either of these young attorneys. And there’s one thing that would make me feel even better about the prospect of Micah Caskey being my representative…
The best thing that Tem had going for him was that he had notions of reform that seemed to come straight out of the Power Failure project I conceived and directed at The State 25 years ago even though he’s too young to remember it. I had meant to encourage him further in that direction by dropping off a reprint of the series at Mr. Miles’ law office (I still have a few yellowing copies in a closet somewhere). I neglected to do that. I’ll still do so, if he’s interested.
But I’m also going to give one to the winner, next time I see him. It would be great to see him adopt the best part of his erstwhile opponent’s platform…
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Micah responded today:
So don’t let me forget to do that, y’all…
Unfortunately, I can’t give him a digital link.
On at least two occasions, Cindi and I made a point of putting the Power Failure series online. And on both occasions, after a time, some functionary with corporate saw it there online, apparently thought, “What’s this old stuff doing here?” and deleted it. (Under both KR and McClatchy, corporate tried to run the websites centrally, which meant I couldn’t just walk downstairs and find the culprit and tell him to cut it out. I had no idea who was doing it.)
One of these days I’m going to go spend a few hours at the library, download it all and put it up here on the blog, so it will exist somewhere. Then Cindi and I can link to it, which would be handy because most of the problems the series identified, way back in 1991, have yet to be addressed…
Way to go Micah.