Let the South Carolina games begin
by digby
I’m going to settle back and enjoy this one:
Believing it to be “God’s will,” South Carolina State Sen. Lee Bright (R) announced Tuesday that he will a 2014 primary challenge to U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R). Over four years in the State Senate, Bright has taken a number of out-of-the-mainstream positions on a wide array of issues, aligned himself with the anti-government William Wallace Caucus, and served as state campaign chair for the presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Bright also is on the board of a right-wing seminary that believes women should be subservient to men, both in the church and in the home.
This is South Carolina, folks, where the dark art of dirty campaigns has been practiced for generations:
If there is a more down and dirty political venue than South Carolina, I haven’t seen it. The state has a long tradition of negative politics. Some date this to Lee Atwater, who once famously accused an opponent who had been treated for depression as someone who had “been hooked up to jumper cables.” But actually the legacy extends at least to the ante-bellum period. After Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had attacked a fellow senator, South Carolina’s Andrew Butler for a taking a mistress, “the harlot Slavery,” a relative, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, entered the chambers and took a cane to Sumner’s head. He beat the abolitionist so badly that he was unable to return to the Senate for three years and suffered the after-effects the rest of his life. One imagines there are some modern-day Sumners in South Carolina politics, still walking in a daze, wondering what hit them in races where anonymous fliers and phone calls destroyed their careers. This is a state where almost anything goes, even accusing John McCain’s adopted child of being illegitimate, as was done to him in 2000.
This tea partier is a certified loon. But then certified loons tend to be popular in South Carolina. And Graham is vulnerable to a very sleazy whisper campaign the likes of which we haven’t seen since they went after John McCain’s allegedly “illegitimate” but more importantly “black” daughter. (I assume everyone knows she’s his adopted daughter from Bangladesh.) I think most of us know what could happen to Huckleberry.
But South Carolina is also known as the state where insurgencies go to die. When the political establishment down there gangs up on an upstart it isn’t pretty.
The upshot is that this could be a very dirty race. It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple of guys.
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