Category Archives: South Carolina

Let the voters decide the fate of Jake Knotts

The Lexington County Republican Party has called on Jake Knotts to resign, and has done so, at least on the surface, for noble reasons. Good people everywhere are nodding their heads and thinking, “About time. South Carolina no longer has room for that sort.”

I applaud many (although not all) of the motivations that cause people to say that. And I think it might do our state’s reputation some good in the larger world if he were hounded from office.

But in the end, I think it’s none of the Lexington County Republican Party’s business whether Jake stays in office or not. As he says, he doesn’t serve the Republican Party. He serves the voters of his district. He should answer to them. That’s the way the system is supposed to work. Many of the same people calling for his head within the party are also supporting the candidate who has announced she will run against him in two years. Fine. Let the battle be joined. And let the voters decide whether they prefer Jake, or Katrina Shealy. All of this mess over that inexcusable thing that Jake said should be thoroughly hashed out in that election. And it certainly promises to be an interesting one. (And maybe, if we’re lucky, someone else will step in and run, someone who is NOT tainted by the blood feud between Sanford and Knotts, so that we can have a more straight-up election about values that have nothing to do with power politics between rival factions.)

There are many things that should NOT be settled by public vote. Matters of public policy, for instance. Ours is a representative democracy, and government by plebiscite is in no way to settle complex issues.

But a vote of the people is precisely how we are supposed to settle the important issue of who will be those elected representatives. And we must have the greatest respect for that prerogative of the people, or else, whatever our high-minded standards (and I do find it ironic to hear some of the high-minded pronouncements of principle I’m hearing from some of these Lexington County Republicans, although I welcome it), our system is not grounded in the ultimate source of legitimacy, the people.

That’s what I think about the Jake Knotts affair. Leave it to the voters.

Now, I expect to get hit with all kinds of howls of protest from those who think Jake’s my big buddy, just because, after opposing him strenuously for election after election, we very reluctantly supported him over Ms. Shealy (actually, over Mark Sanford, because that’s what the election was about) in the last election. Such people fail to understand what I think about Jake. I explained it pretty well in a column I wrote at the time, and I urge you to go back and read it. If you’re still not satisfied, well, I’m working on a post that elaborates. I’ll try to get it posted by tomorrow sometime. (I wanted to get it done today before posting this, but it got so long and involved — it involves trying to explain some thoughts I have about the world that I’ve never tried to set in writing before, partly because they take so long to explain — that I just set it aside, and decided to go ahead and post this.)

But in the meantime, consider this: Sen. Knotts is not accused of stealing from the state treasury, or high treason, or physical violence or anything else that would justify short-circuiting the voting relationship between him and his constituents. What he did was say a word — a word that reveals a particularly nasty, grossly unacceptable set of attitudes toward other people based upon the accidents of birth. It was inexcusable, and indicative of much deeper problems, of a great flaw of character.

There are people who believe that merely having such attitudes should be criminalized. I am not among them. For this reason I oppose “hate crime” laws. It’s one of the few things I agree with libertarians (like Jake’s enemy Mark Sanford) about. I believe it is unAmerican to punish a person for his attitudes, however grotesquely objectionable those attitudes are. What we should do is punish the act. And in this case, Jake Knotts didn’t ACT upon his attitude, he just said the word.

Then, let the attitude fend for itself in the public marketplace. This is particularly true of an attitude expressed by a politician. Let the voters decide whether they can live with what it reveals of the candidate’s character. Yes, I know that many people disapprove of the decisions that other voters make. But that’s none of their business. If the poor, black electorate of Washington, D.C., wants to re-elect Marion Barry, that’s up to them — unless he commits a felony or otherwise disqualifies himself. If the redneck white electorate of Georgia wants to elect a Lester Maddox, that is likewise up to them. One of the things these Lexington County Republicans are struggling with is whether they want to be associated with attitudes reminiscent of Gov. Maddox. Good for them. But the final arbiters must be the voters, not a party.

That’s the American way. With all its warts.

More on the subject — probably more than you want — later.

Maybe they thought they were voting for the Rev. Al Green

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That’s my latest theory to explain the victory of Alvin Greene in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. They thought he was Al Green. (Never mind that this is South Carolina and Al’s from Memphis; just indulge me for a moment — I’m on a roll here.)

And if that’s what those voters were thinking, well then, who can blame them? Certainly not I.

A few days ago, I was listening to Pandora while blogging, and had to stop what I was doing to listen fully to an awesome track by the Rev. Al. It was an unlikely song to be so awesome. It was “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” Yep, the Bee Gees tune.

Now, I feel about the Bee Gees sort of the way Rob in High Fidelity (my very favorite book of the last 15 years, which I know I mention all the frickin’ time) felt about Peter Frampton. (In fact, I feel more that way about Peter Frampton than I do about the Bee Gees, because some of their pre-disco stuff was good. But their disco sins are difficult to forgive.) If you haven’t read the book, you may remember the scene in the movie. Rob and Dick and Barry go to hear this new singer in a club, and as Rob enters, he hears the strains of “Baby I Love Your Way,” and grimaces, “Is that Peter F___ing Frampton?” and almost leaves. But he listens, and is so enchanted with what the singer does with the song, that he says to Dick and Barry, “I always hated this song,” and they moan a sympathetic, “Yeahhhh…” and then he confesses, “Now I kind of like it…” and they moan, “Yeahhhh…” (Here’s the scene, by the way.)

OK, so sexual attraction was also involved there. But I know that with Rob’s highly refined pop music sensibilities, he would also have been blown away by Al Green doing that Bee Gees tune. It was amazing.

Where was I? Oh, yes… so if that was why folks voted for Alvin Greene, all is forgiven.

But only in a real emergency, mind you…

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Thanks to Jack Kuenzie for bringing our attention to this via Twitter:

Andre Bauer, describing himself on his FB page: “The only candidate who will tell the truth when need be.” Perhaps not the best wording. 1:21 PM Jun 9th via web

And sure enough, there it is, right where Jack said. The entire blurb:

From the honks to the road side chats our people are determined to vote for the real conservative in race for governor.The only candidate to give back his paycheck.The only candidate who runs his own business.The only candidate who has experience marketing South Carolina to business leaders across the world.The only candidate who will tell the truth when need be.

He means it, too. When the chips are down and all other options have been exhausted, ol’ Andre will flat tell you some truth, and take a polygraph to prove the amazing feat.

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Huck Finn, which I long ago used in a column about Bill Clinton:

So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I’m a-going to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.

Ol’ Huck had a finely developed moral sense, and could tell when it was time to do something as outrageous and “unregular” as tell the truth. And ol’ Andre’s making sure that we know that if and when the need arises, he can do the same.

Free Times story on Greene BEFORE the vote

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Corey Hutchins over at the Free Times brings my attention to his story about Alvin Greene, posted this afternoon:

…State party executive director Jay Parmley looked like he’d bitten down on a joy buzzer as he sat in the chair of his office, scrolling up and down the precinct reports on his computer monitor shaking his head, cursing under his breath, wondering why, why, why; how, how, how?

In the race for United States Senate, political unknown Alvin M. Greene had walloped challenger Vic Rawl.

Around the state, Democratic activists were facing the smacking electoral truth that a non-campaigning, unemployed, black, country-living, coo-coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs nobody who’d been kicked out of the Army and was currently facing federal sex charges had just beaten — in the Democratic primary, and by 17 percentage points — a well-known former legislator, judge and current Charleston County councilman who’d raised a quarter of a million bucks for the race and for months been campaigning his ass off.

The news wasn’t sinking in as much as it was settling like a depth charge….

But I wasn’t nearly as impressed by that as I was by the fact that Corey had done a reasonably complete story on Greene well before Tuesday’s vote. An excerpt from that May 19 piece:

At the end of a dirt driveway off a dusty highway in rural Clarendon County, just outside the town of Manning, a lawn overgrown with weeds sports no campaign sign for the man living in a house there who has filed to run as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate.

The candidate, a 32-year-old unemployed black Army veteran named Alvin Greene, walked into the state Democratic Party headquarters in March with a personal check for $10,400. He said he wanted to become South Carolina’s U.S. senator.

Needless to say, Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler was a bit surprised.

Fowler had never met Greene before, she says, and the party isn’t in the habit of taking personal checks from candidates filing for office. She told Greene that he’d have to start a campaign account if he wanted to run. She asked him if he thought it was the best way to invest more than $10,000 if he was unemployed.

Several hours later, Greene came back with a campaign check. The party accepted it, and Greene became an official candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was eager to have his picture put on the party’s website to show he had filed, says state Democratic Party executive director Jay Parmley.

And Corey was asking Greene himself some of the questions that should have been asked:

Reached by phone May 12, and asked how he thought his campaign was going, Greene said, “So far, so good.”

Asked when he planned to file with the FEC, he replied, “OK, yeah, so what do you need? What are you trying to get from me, now? I’m in a hurry.”

Greene says he decided to run for the United States Senate two years ago when he was serving in Korea.

As for the $10,400 he used to get on the ballot, Greene says it was money he’d made from being a soldier.

“That was my personal pay,” he says. “Money out of my pocket.”

Parmley says he finds the whole thing odd.

He says running for any other office in the state would cost much less money. “If you’re going to file for something and not do anything, why waste $10,000?”

Even then, ahead of time, Corey was raising the Republican conspiracy theory, rightly or wrongly:

Greene’s curious candidacy raises the question that something else might be going on.

Republican place markers in Palmetto State Democratic primaries are campaign legend.

In the early ‘90s, a Republican strategist was prosecuted and forced to pay a fine when he was found to have coaxed an unemployed black fisherman into running in a primary race to increase white turnout at the polls in a Lowcountry congressional race. The political operative paid the man’s filing fee.

Greene says he’s never heard of such a thing. He says he just really wanted to run.

Regardless of how or why he got into the race, his candidacy has certainly created some political intrigue.

Good enterprise, young man. Too bad more of us didn’t read it at the time.

Vic Rawl statement about Alvin Greene

The Candidate Was A Spy, and other startling revelations from Alvin Greene

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I may have found a paucity of coverage of the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in my local paper this morning, but the intel is coming in thick and fast from other sources today.

For instance, speaking of intel… didja know Alvin Greene served in military intelligence in the U.S. Army. Really. That’s what he told The Root, anyway. Kind of gives new meaning to the whole conspiracy theory thing, huh?

Read the whole interview here. An excerpt:

TR: Where did you campaign?

AG: All across the state.

TR: Any specificstops or speeches you can remember?

AG: Nothing in particular. I talked with a lot of people over the phone, and people in the press. They’ll print what they want in the press, just bits of it. I don’t know. It worked out. I worked hard. It’s not a big surprise.

TR: How do you plan to beat Jim DeMint in November?

AG: I would like to debate him in September. I would like an hour on a major network. Just to, you know, discuss issues about South Carolina and the rest of the country.

TR What do you think makes you a better candidate than DeMint?

AG: We have more unemployed now than any other time in South Carolina’s history, so something isn’t working. We spend two times more on inmates than students. Priorities are not in order. I want to make a difference and Jim–the incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint–he’s against the health care reform. They’re trying to repeal the health care law that was passed. The Republicans are trying to repeal the health care bill that was signed into law recently. Things like that. That’s the difference. I’m for health care reform. And getting folks to work here.

TR: Do you plan on getting a Web site now that you’re through the primaries?

AG: Well, I need campaign contributions to really get my Web site up. I’m working on that now, but that comes from campaign contributions.

TR: Do you have any?

AG: No, but I’m working on some things.

The Fix lists Top Five nastiest SC races ever

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We are truly legendary, to the point that political junkies sit around up in Washington dreaming up Top Five lists about us, a laHigh Fidelity, such as “The five nastiest South Carolina races ever.”

At least, Chris Cillizza at the WashPost‘s The Fix does.

And it’s a pretty good list even though it’s awfully heavy on stuff that happened during my own career. He does, to give him credit, give a mention to the legendary Preston Brooks, but the Top Five are all 1978 or later.

Given that limitation, it’s a good list. He counts them down thusly:

5. 2002 Republican governors runoff: This is the one I wrote about yesterday (at least, I wrote about the GOP effort to come together AFTER this nasty battle), between Mark Sanford and Bob Peeler. Peeler’s campaign, run by party regulars, was inexcusable, as Cillizza correctly recalls: “In one particularly memorable Peeler ad, a Sanford look-alike is shown stripping a soldier down to his underwear to illustrate Sanford’s alleged attitude toward military funding.” Yep. I remember it well.

4. 1978 4th district race: The abominable campaign against Max Heller, featuring anti-Semitic push-polling by Carroll Campbell’s pollster. I was in Tennessee at the time covering Lamar Alexander and Jake Butcher, but I’ve heard plenty about this from my good friend Samuel Tenenbaum over the years.

3. 1980 2nd district race: Also before I came home to SC, but I knew the players later: Lee Atwater, on behalf of Floyd Spence, told the press that Tom Turnipseed had been hooked up to “jumper cables” — a reference to shock treatments he had received for depression as a teenager.

2. 2010 Republican governors primary: That’s the one we just lived through. Or rather, are still living through. If we live.

1. 2000 Republican presidential primary: The filthy tricks that George W. Bush’s campaign used against John McCain to stop his candidacy and give Bush the momentum to go on and win the presidency. Not sure this was necessarily the nastiest by SC standards, but it certainly had the most profound impact on the world. I firmly believe that otherwise John McCain would have been our president on 9/11 and thereafter, which would have been better for us all. That knowledge of how South Carolina let the world down was very much on my mind when we pushed for McCain’s victory in the 2008 primary. (I also felt responsible because the newspaper — over my strong objections — endorsed Bush over McCain in 2000.)

They keep talking about us. And they will continue to do so, until we turn our backs on all this stuff. Which is why I’m rooting for Vincent Sheheen.

Clyburn expands upon conspiracy theory

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Alvin Greene isn’t the only candidate that Jim Clyburn thinks has nefarious secret backers, according to TPM Muckraker:

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has called for a U.S. Attorney investigation into the mysterious candidacy of Democratic Senate nominee Alvin Greene because he thinks the mischief goes far beyond one wacky race. Clyburn (D-SC), Congress’ highest ranking African American, told TPM in an interview today he believes at least two other Democratic candidates on Tuesday’s primary ballot were planted by people with deep pockets and nefarious motives.

“The party’s choice in the 1st Congressional district lost. The party’s choice for U.S. Senate lost. Sounds like a pattern to me,” Clyburn told TPM. He said Greene was one of three Democratic candidates in three separate races whom the state party didn’t back or even recognize. All three candidates are African American.

One is Gregory Brown, who ran unsuccessfully against Clyburn in the 6th Congressional district. Another is Ben Frasier, who prevailed against state party-favored candidate Robert Burton in the 1st district. Greene, Brown and Frasier have something else in common — they haven’t filed any campaign finance reports with the Federal Elections Commission…

Wow. This is getting deep. Conspiracy this broad and far-reaching suggests the resources of a nation-state, or quasi-national players, such as the old Soviet Union, or the Hezbollah-Iran axis, or Howard Rich. Or something. As the Church Lady would have said, “Could it be… the Devil!?!?”

Naahhh…

The Politico profile of Will Folks

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Monday night, as I was resting up before election day, I got an e-mail from Ben Smith at Politico asking for an interview the following day — about Will Folks and the Nikki Haley story.

I said OK, and called him next morning on the Blackberry as I was driving to my polling place to vote. I was a little distracted during the interview because I was hunting for my polling place (sometimes it’s at the John Deere place on 378, sometimes at the church across the road — and I mistakenly went to the Deere place first as we spoke), but he seems to have extracted a couple of tidbits worth using.

Nothing I haven’t said before here, I don’t think. But y’all might find the piece interesting. It’s fairly long — which means that Polito has now published more about Will Folks than my old newspaper did this morning about Alvin Greene. Sigh…

It’s called “The blogger who upended S.C. politics.” Which you know Will’s gotta be digging.

Where was The State on Alvin Greene TODAY?

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As I’ve been saying to anyone who asks, the nomination of Alvin Greene is a failure with enough blame to go around to everyone. The voters, of course (as politically incorrect, as anti-democratic, as it is to blame the precious voter). The Democratic Party. And definitely the media — both MSM and the vaunted, tell-you-everything (according to the hype) blogosphere. Apparently, bloggers were too busy telling you who they’d slept with to check out who the hell this guy was. (And yes, I include myself — not on the kiss-and-tell part, but on the not-checking-out-Alvin part.)

As for the MSM — well, it’s awfully easy to beat up on them on this. And they deserve it. That is NOT to blame the reporters and editors who are busting their butts trying to get the job done with grossly inadequate resources. It’s to blame the media as institutions that have failed as businesses to stay viable enough to do their jobs properly. Sound self-interested, since the failure of newspapers is why I don’t have a job with them any more? Well, yeah. But as a former newspaper exec, and an editor for three decades, I know whereof I speak.

True, newspapers have long ignored noncandidates. And they have long ignored, to a lesser extent, primary races to nominate a sacrificial lamb to go up against an invulnerable incumbent. Not because that was the right thing to do, but because when you’re covering scores of races, you have to set priorities, and the hotly contested ones get most of the ink.

But that traditional bias against the boring has been exponentially exacerbated by the emptying of newsrooms via the layoffs of recent years. Now, it’s not a choice; some important races simply are not going to be covered.

This year, you pretty much had to be in the governor’s race to get the media’s attention. And even then, if your name wasn’t Nikki Haley, it was hard to get free media. After he withdrew from the race several months ago, Dwight Drake told me that he had expected it to be hard to raise money (and it was so hard for him that that’s why he quit). But what surprised him was that the media was not to be found. As an old political hand, he was stunned at the lack of coverage.

But still. For none of us — not even people like me, who TRY (but often fail) to keep up with as much of it as possible — to know anything about this Alvin Greene guy is just outrageous. At the very least, even if this noncandidate was ignored, Vic Rawl should have gotten the minimal coverage necessary to give him the name recognition to win. But he didn’t.

OK, so at any rate, at least the media has jumped all over this story now, right? Mr. Greene has TV crews chasing

Finally, I found it -- at the bottom of Page B3.

him. Mother Jones had a story about him on Tuesday (a day earlier would have been nice, but then it’s not Mother Jones responsibility to inform SC about its own candidates). Everywhere I go, people are asking about him. “All Things Considered” called me this morning to get my thoughts on how all this happened.

Well, yes and no. Yes, he’s getting a lot of coverage now. But… and I really hate to say this about my old paper, because I love it and wish my friends still there all the success in the world … The State was weirdly negligent on the story in today’s paper.

When I read my paper this morning, it was the first thing I looked for. On the front page, of course — that’s where I put it. But it wasn’t on the front page. OK, on the Metro front — nope, not there. OK, so it’s packaged with the jump of another election story… nope. All right, back to the front page, to read the cutesie “winners and losers” story that I had initially bypassed about all the quirky little water-cooler talker stuff from the primary. I mean, it’s weird that this didn’t TOP that story if it was in it, but maybe it’s down farther… nope.

I gave up at that point, because I needed to leave to keep my appointment at ETV. But bewildered, I searched the paper again after lunch… and finally found it as a brief on page B3. Not in a roundup of election briefs, but just generic Metro & State briefs. It wasn’t even the first item. It was below a crime brief. As for the content, it was essentially the same brief I had seen on the Web site the day before.

I’m sure the paper will have more complete coverage of this tomorrow, and play it better. Even in the good old days of full staffs, things tended to be disorganized on the day after all-out election day coverage. I see Clyburn’s intimation that it’s all a foul GOP plot is getting some play at thestate.com now.

But I was really disappointed this morning.

Barrett brings back Sarge, leaves out GOP

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Boyohboy — Gresham Barrett has hit the airwaves with the first media shot in the runoff campaign. And I’m sorry to say that he’s brought back the drill sergeant.

Some of you say you liked this bit the first time, that it didn’t make you cringe with embarrassment. Well, you should like this, too. But to me, there’s nothing more likely to make me want to look away than “comedy” that doesn’t quite cut it. Also, as weary as I am of hearing all those hollow cliches that GOP candidates love to spout (I’m a conservative a true conservative my daddy was a conservative daddy my mama was a conservative mama…), it’s even more off-putting when they do it with a smug, self-satisfied smirk.

But if you CAN watch, you might notice something, as John O’Connor did:

Missing from Barrett’s new ad? Any mention of the Republican Party. Calls himself “an honest conservative.” http://youtu.be/aCV6kH6voK4

Interesting. Has Barrett decided to join Nikki in running AGAINST the GOP?

You know, that’s going to make the Republicans’ “Post-Primary Unity Breakfast” scheduled for June 23 in Columbia just a tad… awkward. As I anticipated yesterday.

Oh, and another thing about the drill instructor: He needs a haircut. High and tight, Sar’nt; high and tight…

Watch me tonight on SC ETV with Mark Quinn — but WITHOUT Nikki Haley

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Just taped a segment over at ETV with Mark Quinn for tonight’s installment of “The Big Picture.”

Watch it at 7:30 p.m. on WRLK, as well as on ETV-HD. The show will also air on the radio Friday at 1 p.m.

My understanding is that Gresham Barrett will be on the show as well, although he wasn’t on with me. My part was just Mark and me shooting the … stuff… about Tuesday’s results. We talked Nikki Haley, Vincent Sheheen, Alvin Greene, and other stuff.

However… Nikki Haley, last I heard, will NOT be on the show. In fact, I was told that her campaign had not even responded to any of ETV’s invitations. I asked “What did you try?” and the answer was, “Everything.” Multiple times, in case an e-mail or something got lost.

Could it be … and I’m just speculating here… could it be that Nikki doesn’t want to face the folks at ETV because she plans to vote to sustain the governor’s veto of their funding next Tuesday?

Nahhhh. Probably just a miscommunication. When somebody with her campaign sees this (and apparently someone over there is watching, since it took no time for them to set me straight last week — which I appreciate), no doubt they’ll call ETV back, and you’ll see her on the show tonight.

Maybe.

The Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate

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You’ve probably never seen him before, but here he is, on ABC news video.

He thinks he’s going to win. Against Jim DeMint. And why not? He just won the Democratic nomination.

Will GOP be willing to come back together?

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The Republican Party theoretically has all the advantages looking toward November, in the gubernatorial election as well as in others: After all, more than twice as many people took a Republican ballot yesterday as voted in the Democratic. Even though she didn’t win her primary outright the way Vincent Sheheen did, Nikki Haley still got a lot more votes than he did. Her 49 percent represented more than 204,000 votes. Sheheen’s 59 percent represented only 110,000.

And the embarrassment over the winner of the Dems’ primary for U.S. Senate shows that’s a party that still has a way to go to get its act together.

But if the GOP continues to be as bitterly divided as it has been lately, if she can’t put all the bickering behind her, that advantage could melt away as Republican get discouraged and stay home, and independents move toward the more upbeat, unifying figure of Vincent Sheheen.

If history is the only guide, she has nothing to worry about: Republicans ALWAYS put their differences behind them after the primary.

But will they this year? I mean, seriously, have you ever seen it get this nasty before? And not even because of anything any of the candidates did. But the things that were done around them — the words of Will Folks, Larry Marchant and Jake Knotts, and the accusations and counter-accusations that came in response to what they said — revealed some bitter fissures that seem unlikely to heal easily.

Will the mainstream Republicans who have been so roundly criticized by Nikki actually line up behind her? I mean, her campaign from the start has been from the beginning more of a crusade against them than against Democrats. One is reminded of Democrat Pug Ravenel, who in 1974 called the Establishment Democrats who ran the Legislature a “den of thieves” — in response to which they took him to court and had him stripped of his nomination and dropped down the memory hole, a series of events that led a fed-up electorate to choose the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

I find myself remembering something else closer to the present day. In 2002, Mark Sanford won a bitter runoff campaign to become the GOP nominee. I was greatly gratified over that, and pretty disgusted with the mainstream Republicans who had run a campaign that I felt sometimes went outside the bounds. (If you’ll recall, I strongly supported Sanford at the time. I thought he was the kind of good-government advocate that Nikki portrays herself as today.) Well, he showed them, right?

But as unpleasant as the campaign was, immediately after the runoff — I’m remembering it as the next day or so — leading Republicans from throughout the state, representing all his primary opponents, gathered on a dais outside of party headquarters for a big kiss-and-make-up ceremony at which they pledged their undying loyalty, and their unflagging efforts to get him elected in the fall. I was struck by some of the people who showed up — even Glenn McConnell, who doesn’t give governors of either party the time of day normally (McConnell’s party is the Senate more than the GOP).

I was there, and I wanted to talk to Sanford for something I was working on, but didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I did run into Jenny, and asked her to give him the message that I was looking for him. He called me later on his mobile from a car leaving town.

I said something like, “That was some event, huh? They’re really lining up behind you.” And while I don’t have the exact words in front of me, he said something life, “Yeah, well. I suppose one has to do those kinds of things.” He was MIGHTILY bored, and his voiced just dripped contempt for these former rivals who had showed up to promise to fight for him. He obviously saw himself as someone apart from and above the whole GOP solidarity thing.

Now, you know, I can’t stand political parties, and I think party loyalty is one of the most harmful forces in American politics — it fosters intellectual dishonesty, requiring that adherents always agree with the most foolish thing that a member of their party says, and disagree with the wisest utterances of their opponents. And I liked that Sanford wasn’t a typical Republican in that regard.

But even I was put off by his condescension. It was really obnoxious. But at the time, I brushed past it, moving on to the reason I had wanted him to call me. And it was just such an ODD moment — you know how it is sometimes when somebody says something really odd and off-key, and you just move past it — that I didn’t know how to take it or what to say about it.

Now I do. Now I’ve seen, over and over, the kind of contempt in which Mark Sanford holds those poor saps who came out to support him that day. Now, that remark doesn’t stand out as a stray anomaly. It fits.

More than that, they’ve seen it, too. And they are bound to be wary of lining up behind someone else who shows every sign of wanting to be just like Mark Sanford, someone who hasn’t even waited to become governor to alienate them and run against them.

So I wonder: Will the usual thing happen? Will the GOP close ranks and line up behind Nikki Haley? And will they be saps again if they do so?

OK, let’s beat up on ME: I’m a horrible citizen

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People are giving me a hard time for being mean to Andre, as I knew they would. I just got to thinking about how recently lots of folks were worried about him becoming governor (with reason) and thought someone should take note of how fortunate things turned out.

So now I’m going to feel like a louse next time I see Andre. Only I won’t tell him that because I hate backing down, and that’ll make me feel like even more of a louse… It’s tough being a Catholic blogger. All that guilt.

But let me see if I can expiate a little of it with some mortification of me. Don’t feel bad, Andre: I’m a horrible citizen. I’ll bet Andre at least knew who he wanted to vote for for U.S. Senate. But I didn’t, so I left it blank, and look what happened: A guy facing charges for indecency got nominated over the only candidate I’d heard of on the Democratic side — a guy who, as far as I know, was perfectly fine.

How can a guy facing a morals charge, a guy with “no campaign funds, no signs, and no website” even, win the primary over a guy who had at least campaigned a little? Someone suggested it was because his name was on the ballot first. Kind of makes you wonder about this whole Democracy thing, huh?

I mean, come ON, people — I’d never heard of this Greene guy. I didn’t know MUCH about Vic Rawl, beyond the fact that he’s one of my 542 Facebook “friends.” At least he’d taken the trouble to do THAT.

But I can’t castigate anyone but myself. I didn’t vote in that race. And that was supremely irresponsible of me. I should have done the research, in spite of the fact that Jim DeMint seems inevitable. I don’t like having DeMint as my senator, and I should at least do my best to decide whom I want going up against him, however slim that candidate’s chances may be.

But I didn’t. I was so mesmerized by the governor’s race, and a couple of others that happened to catch my eye along the way, that I neglected that one. And of course, I hadn’t even decided to vote in the Democratic primary until the last minute.

My problem is, I’m so accustomed to knowing a lot about these candidates in spite of myself, because they all used to come see me for endorsement interviews. I have to learn to do what everybody else does (at least, they do it if they are good citizens), and do my research as a citizen and be prepared. Next time, I will.

Y’all remind me.

Just in case you thought DeMint was in trouble…

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Not that you did, but just in case you did, I’ll share this release from Democratic Party HQ:

Columbia, SC- Today, South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler asked Alvin Greene to withdraw from the race for US Senate. Greene, a resident of Manning S.C., was the apparent winner of the Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate in yesterday’s primary. Since the election, the Associated Press has revealed that Greene was recently charged with disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity after showing obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student. Fowler released the following statement after her conversation with Greene:

“Today I spoke with Alvin Greene, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the US Senate, and asked him to withdraw from the race. I did not do this lightly, as I believe strongly that the Democratic voters of this state have the right to select our nominee. But this new information about Mr. Greene has would certainly have affected the decisions of many of those voters,” said Fowler.

“We are proud to have nominated a Democratic ticket this year that, with the apparent exception of Mr. Greene, reflects South Carolina’s values. Our candidates want to give this state a new beginning without the drama and irresponsibility of the past 8 years, and the charges against Mr. Greene indicate that he cannot contribute to that new beginning. I hope he will see the wisdom of leaving the race.”

You see, the Democrats are jealous: The Republicans are getting all that free media on “The Daily Show,” and they want some, too…

Count your blessings, SC: Andre won’t be our governor

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Amid all the hoo-hah over Nikki Haley and Gresham Barrett and Vincent Sheheen, and Converse Chellis losing his job and all that down-ballot stuff, it’s easy to forget to be thankful for something:

Andre Bauer is not going to be our governor.

You’re going to scoff, now, and say “How absurd; he was never going to be our governor!” And I say, how soon we forget.

Remember that last year, when we were all suffering Sanford fatigue and thinking how great it would be not to have to look at his long, morose face any more, mooning over his soulmate, we’d get to the point of talking about getting rid of him, and somebody would always say, “Hold on! No way! Then we’d be stuck with Andre.”

Now I thought that was wrongheaded. I thought the very best way to make sure that Andre would NOT be elected governor would be to make him our interim governor. I felt certain that the best way to inoculate ourselves against him was with a big dose of scrutiny. And to make him governor at a time when that office was under unprecedented close attention would guarantee he’d have no chance at the ballot box.

As things worked out, he got enough scrutiny for voters to say “No way.” But if he had been serving as governor, there would have been so much more. There would have been another “free-lunch school kids are like stray animals” moment practically every day.

To me, the secret to Andre’s success was that he had to do something extremely outrageous — such as driving over 100 miles per hour in his state car and evading a ticket by reminding the trooper who he was, or alarming a city cop so much by his wild behavior in broad daylight on Assembly Street to cause the cop to draw his weapon, or crashing an airplane — to draw attention. As governor, we’d be watching him more, and seeing more.

The reason knowledgeable folks were having these debates — would letting him be interim governor give him a better chance or worse chance? — was that we all knew something about Andre: No matter how dim you think his chances are, he always wins elections. He seemed like a weak House candidate — but he won. He seemed like he’d never make the senate — but he did. When he sought statewide office, no one worried — but he became lieutenant governor. And from the moment that happened, everybody knew what he would try for next. The “hardest-working man in SC politics,” as both friends and detractors styled him, would never quit before he had won the top job. This is the guy who came in second in the primary in 2002, but won the runoff. Then, the same thing happened in 2006, which we all thought meant the voters had enough of him — but he won the runoff AGAIN. You just could not count him out.

The idea he would become our governor, in keeping with this maddening illogic of inevitability, has been a worry nagging at the back of my mind for the past eight years. But now, none of us has to worry about that any more.

So thanks for that, Nikki Haley. And Jake Knotts. And Larry Marchant. And Chip Saltsman (remember? the “Barack the Magic Negro” guy). And all the unsung heroes who have played a role in making sure that we wouldn’t be saying “Governor Bauer” a year from now.

Now — once Nikki has dispensed with Gresham Barrett — we just have to ask ourselves one question: With Andre out of the way, which candidate — Nikki Haley or Vincent Sheheen — would be more likely to get us on “The Daily Show” the most? And then, we most vote for the other candidate.

Some big smiles from the night’s big winner

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Looking back over the pictures I shot tonight at Vincent Sheheen’s victory party, the thing that strikes me is that I actually have a couple of shots of the normally low-key, unassuming Sheheen with a supercharged, 1,000-watt grin. (C. Aluka Berry, standing right next to me, got an even BIGGER grin over at thestate.com.)

And why not? He was the night’s big winner.

Maybe y’all saw this coming; I certainly didn’t. I thought if anybody won all the marbles for a gubernatorial nomination tonight, it would be Nikki Haley. If you look at polls from recent weeks, the trend was up and up for her, at a meteoric pace, with the last poll showing her at 43 percent, with a bullet. By contrast, the best the slow-but-steady Sheheen had shown in a poll was 36 percent. And that was in a three-way race (really, a two-way), while Nikki was posting those numbers pulling away from a field of four.

So it was that I was worried I was driving away from the REAL story tonight by heading over to Camden, but it turns out that’s where the Big Mo of the night was, while Nikki — while posting better than her polling numbers — found herself in a runoff with the lackluster Gresham Barrett (yeah, the guy in the painfully strained, goofy drill sergeant ad).

Republicans will comfort themselves that they had more than twice the turnout, but good Lord, I expected them to do better than THAT. Look at all the hotly contested races they had, at every level. While Democrats (at my polling place, anyway) had the governor’s race, plus a nearly invisible two-way competition for the office they have owned, superintendent of education, and oh yes — they got to choose (yawn) who would get to lose to Jim DeMint in the fall. Y’all know what a hard time I had deciding to forgo having a say in all those GOP contests (and only chose a Democratic ballot in the end because I felt so strongly that Vincent was the right man for governor– and I wanted to cast a positive vote for that office); I’m sure most independent voters (and a few Democrats as well) struggled with that same calculation.

How did Vincent do it? Well, I know what y’all are thinking — it was my last-minute endorsement, and the ad he bought on bradwarthen.com. (You’ll note that Rick Quinn and Seth Rose also came out on top, obviously for the same reason — the ads — and Scott Winburn would have won, but he and Seth couldn’t both do so.)

But I think there were other factors at work, too. I cited some of them last night. And I think Nikki Haley, once she’s done soaking up all this free media of recent days, is going to find Vincent a tough opponent in the long haul. And Vincent is going to find her a really energetic, talented campaigner who will shine on the stump as the uglier memories of this embarrassing GOP primary (which now has two more weeks to go) fade.

This is going to be a great election for our next governor.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Category Archives: South Carolina

Let the voters decide the fate of Jake Knotts

Maybe they thought they were voting for the Rev. Al Green

Free Times story on Greene BEFORE the vote

Vic Rawl statement about Alvin Greene

Statement by Judge Vic Rawl

The Candidate Was A Spy, and other startling revelations from Alvin Greene

The Fix lists Top Five nastiest SC races ever

Clyburn expands upon conspiracy theory

The Politico profile of Will Folks

Where was The State on Alvin Greene TODAY?

Barrett brings back Sarge, leaves out GOP

Watch me tonight on SC ETV with Mark Quinn — but WITHOUT Nikki Haley

The Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate

Will GOP be willing to come back together?

OK, let’s beat up on ME: I’m a horrible citizen

Just in case you thought DeMint was in trouble…

Count your blessings, SC: Andre won’t be our governor

Some big smiles from the night’s big winner