Palmetto Politics

RESPONSE:   CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC.  But if I  wrote for Wonkette, I'd still  file this under "DEPARTMENT OF "I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT."

Still, it was encouraging and affirming in all sorts of ways for this former South Carolinian to find this article at Politico:  S.C.Sees Its Star Rise for '08.  If I seem skeptical,  I'm not the only one.  The Dems can't believe it either. 

South Carolina Democrats are on the move again. That could spell trouble for Palmetto State Republicans who have grown complacent after having things their way for the past 27 years.

Some think the pendulum is beginning to swing back....

"I can't believe it," said Phil Noble of Charleston, an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor in 1994. "I haven't seen this kind of energy in a long time."

Former Gov. Jim Hodges was ecstatic.

"This is the best group of presidential candidates," he said. "Our candidates are absolutely fabulous. We're going to win because we're right on the issues."

State Sen. Joel Lourie (D-Richland) said, "This is something I've never experienced." ...

"They hit a home run," said Neal Thigpen, a Francis Marion University professor and sometime adviser to GOP candidates. "This is what the Democrats need to do in this state to get people enlivened.  

"At this early juncture, you'd have to say the Democrats have got something going."

The S.C. Democratic presidential primary is set for Jan. 29, a week after New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary.

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, a presidential hopeful, says the S.C. contest is key. "Whoever comes out of South Carolina the winner is going to be the nominee," he says. ...

"The juice is on their side," Thigpen said of the Democrats.

Republicans seem bothered and bewildered. Nothing seems to be going their way. Many are still looking for a savior, a candidate they can get excited about. Democrats, on the other hand, smell victory. They look at what's happening on the other side -- scandals, an unpopular war, a party that has lost its way and a failed presidency. 

[quote ends]

I know former Governor Jim Hodges---we grew up in the same upcountry milltown and went in the same high school class (hi, Jimmy, in case you ever google yourself!)----and it's good to know he's feeling "ecstatic" with all these other signs that the state might actually get a grip on itself and move politically into, say, the LATE Twentieth Century.

Talking to people from Lancaster (my hometown) always requires an enormous adjustment, I find; all the premises I jettisoned a long time ago as not exactly in line with reality or logic still hold sway among many of the people I grew up with.   I love it that  in Answers.com, the note on Jim Hodges says he grew up in "rural Lancaster, South  Carolina."  It ain't rural now and it wasn't then. He lived a few streets away from me---I can still see his house in my mind's eye, since it was directly across the street from my friend Lisa's----and though to some people a small SC town of the Seventies might have seemed rural, there is in fact a wide gap between the interests, issues, and concerns of people who live in a town where everything centers on the textile mill and the people who actually farm the cotton.

They're very intelligent people, so the question is---and I don't know the answer---why?  Why would such intelligent, kind, courteous, civil, energetic people have drunk the Rovian Kool-Aid when all they have to do is look around and see that what they are being told DOESN'T MATCH THE FACTS. 

And some of them get horribly upset---much more so than people in my little Florida town---if you question their assertions.  I remember a family friend hotly informing me that I was unquestionably destined for Hell because I expressed a preference for the pre-Lewinsky Clinton.  She meant it, too.  Furthermore, even though we were friends, you could see she sort of thought it would be exactly what I deserved.  (Later she apologized and said she would pray for me----to become a Republican, I reckon). 

When South Carolina finally does shake off its reverence for received wisdom, it will KICK ASS.  I am sick and tired of having people smile tolerantly when they hear my accent or express surprise that I don't speak exclusively in Bible Belt or Junior League. 

People where I'm from really do cling hard to their beliefs about how the world should be long after the facts should have made it clear that the dead and gone past really is dead and gone.  (Like my father getting teary when he showed me the marks on the sides of the SC Statehouse where the North's cannonballs hit or when he told me about General Sherman burning our little town to the ground.  My dad was an extremely intelligent person who really ought to have been a liberal and a Democrat----he was known far and wide for his basic sense of decency and fairness and his funeral was a "standing room only" affair---but he never really could break free of his small town values or fear that McCarthy (the bad one) was right.

I suppose it isn't just southerners who have the tendency to adopt their parents' politics without questioning very intensely whether the premises stand up to scrutiny; I suppose it's everyone.  Still, it's great to learn that a large number of Palmetto State citizens are starting to ask why things have to be the way they are.

Wake  up, South Carolina, and lead us out of the darkness.