Vote!
by digby
Ed Kilgore has an informative and entertaining recap of the big races today around the country. I particularly like this one:
South Carolina: The Ghost of Lee Atwater
The Governor’s Race
South Carolina is the original home of Republican dirty tricks and skullduggery, having schooled a young Lee Atwater in the art of character assassination through pungent innuendo, and it remains a nest of vipers today. (Remember John McCain’s “love child” from the 2000 campaign? Or the 2008 attacks on Mitt Romney’s religion and Fred Thompson’s love life?) This year, it hasn’t disappointed. Just as State Representative Nikki Haley, a hard-core conservative who began the campaign as an underfinanced protégé of disgraced Governor Mark Sanford, began to ascend in the four-candidate pack, a blogger/consultant named Will Folks–a former Sanford and Haley staffer who had been promoting her candidacy for months–came forward to claim that he’d had an affair with the very-married and very “pro-family” Haley in 2009. As Folks trickled out circumstantial “evidence” of the affair on his blog FITSnews.com (slogan: “Unfair. Imbalanced.”), Haley’s allies accused him of having been bought by rival campaigns, while Haley herself denied everything. In fact, she actually managed to prosper, framing the scandal as another sign that she’s being hit with dirty tricks, because she’s a principled right-winger seeking to overturn the Dixiecrat-flavored old boys’ network of Palmetto State GOP politics. Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson rushed to her defense.
And then a second political consultant, who was a top aide to rival candidate and Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, claimed he had also had a fling with Haley. This was followed shortly by a bizarre diatribe by Haley’s own state senator, a Bauer ally with the fine Southern political name of Jake Knotts, who spent much of an Internet interview denigrating Haley, a second-generation Indian-American, by calling her a “raghead,” he said, just like Barack Obama. You really just can’t make this stuff up.
These events have prompted an even larger pro-Haley backlash, which has given her a decent chance of winning the nomination without a runoff (and if she doesn’t get that many votes, it appears her most likely runoff opponent will be Congressman Gresham Barrett, an Upcountry favorite whose cross to bear is an ignominious vote for TARP). Still, Haley is now promising to quit the race–or if elected, the governorship itself–if it is proven she did fool around. This is making Republicans nervous, particularly since Folks is still hinting he has definitive evidence of an affair, and it could possibly scare away primary voters at the last second.
And these people have the nerve to say California is full of nuts.
And speaking of California — if you haven’t voted yet — go do it. If you live in Ca 36, Vote for Winograd. Polls are open until 8:00pm today. Please get out + vote! Find your polling place: http://www.lavote.net/ Voter Hotline (800) 345-VOTE.
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