I was way tired last night after going to Charleston and back and then swinging by a couple of watch parties, so no posting about runoff results.
But then, I didn’t have much to say. There was nothing to say about Nikki Haley because we knew she was going to win. Even the historic news of Tim Scott becoming the first black Republican nominated to Congress from SC since Reconstruction was anticlimactic; we had fully expected him to win big as well.
The suspense was with the lawyers — in the GOP attorney general’s race on the statewide level and Democratic solicitor’s race locally. And the results on both was disappointing.
Leighton Lord was clearly the stronger candidate for attorney general. Alan Wilson is a fine young man (and his wife is a friend from church and from the news biz), but come on — he’s been a lawyer 7 years. I’ve got a kid who’s been a lawyer almost exactly that long. Lord was the managing partner of a large law firm, a man at the peak of his career, admitted to practice before the Supreme Court, and so on and so forth. There just was no contest. If you were a rational employer choosing between these two applicants for such a senior position as attorney general, it wouldn’t take you more than a couple of seconds to choose Lord.
John Meadors was just as clearly better-qualified to be solicitor, something he has amply demonstrated over the course of 23 years of able service as a prosecutor. Yes, Dan Johnson had such experience too, but less of it. I see that Rep. James Smith had endorsed him. I’m having lunch with James tomorrow and maybe he can explain it. But with the endorsements Meadors had, including that of the third candidate in the primary, plus the fact that his team included Joey Opperman, who helped run such an effective runoff campaign for Steve Benjamin, made me think he’d win this one. (Plus, he advertised on this blog, which is usually a clincher.) But he didn’t.
After the Alvin Greene debacle, my faith in democracy has been a bit shaken. While these two instances are nowhere near as bad as that case — not within light years of it — I’m struck again at how whimsical election results can sometimes be. And this year, seemingly, more than most. Yeah, I know about the narrative of “less experience is better” this year, but that is so irrational, so positively childish, that I look for better reasons for the voters to have for the decisions that they make. I wonder: Was Leighton Lord too aristocratic, too “born to rule” seeming for an electorate in the hunt for the common touch (which is related to “experience is bad,” but not quite the same)? If so, why go with the son of a congressman? Was Meadors’ loss as simple as “the black guy won” (even though Meadors had plenty of visible black support)? Let’s hope not.
Anyway, at this point the only thing to do is congratulate Dan Johnson and hope he’ll be a great solicitor — since solicitor he will be, with no GOP opposition. And to give Alan Wilson a more conditional congratulations, and begin to focus on the contest to come in the fall against Democrat Matthew Richardson.
