Peculiar politics in South
Carolina is a never ending saga. On June 15,
South Carolina Republican State Senator Jake Knotts of Lexington told
the South Carolina Senate he
is proud to be a redneck and would not resign from the Senate for having
called
Nikki Haley and President Obama ragheads. Haley is a former Sikh of
Indian ancestry and front-runner for the Republican nomination for
Governor in the June 22nd run-off.
On June 17, Democrat Alvin Greene's
stunning landslide victory in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate
seat
held by Jim De Mint was upheld by the SC's Democratic Executive
Committee's 38.5 to 7.5 vote after hearing a protest by his opponent Vic
Rawl. Rawl's witnesses argued that voting machines malfunctioned to
provide a landslide victory for Greene.
Greene, a Forrest Gump figure, is an
unknown, unemployed,
African-American veteran, who also faces a felony obscenity
charge. In a brief phone interview Greene
said. "They did the right
thing," "I am the best candidate for the United States Senate in the
state of South Carolina."
Rawl is a former judge, and legislator whose 59 to 41% loss shocked the
political establishment. Rawl said he didn't have enough time to
prepare his case before the hearing.
Jake Knotts said the Lexington Republicans who
asked him to resign for
his raghead comments were hypocrites because he had been called a
redneck and
no one came to his defense. He said he is a true redneck if that means a
farmer who works from dawn to dusk and whose neck is red from the sun.
When
Knotts said, "If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the
party
is going to have one hell of a void," he was telling it like it is.
In 1968, the party of Lincoln devised a
Republican Southern
strategy to co-opt George
Wallace's appeal to white bigotry which has been the building block for
Republicanism in the South ever since. I was a Wallace staffer from
1967-71 and became Executive Director of the Wallace Presidential
campaign.
I witnessed Wallace's clever appeal to the prejudices of working
class white folks.
In 1970, Wallace spoke to a crowd of textile
workers in Alabama railing against
the "Northern, liberal media who want the Federal Government
to control every phase and aspect of our daily lives."
"I mean, the long-haired, pointy-headed,
pseudo-intellectuals writers at the New York Times,
who don't have enough sense to park their bicycles straight. They look
down their noses at us and call us pea
pickers and pecker-woods, lint-heads and red-necks. If they call us
red-necks because our necks might be red from an honest day's toil in
the
Summer sun, then call us rednecks because there's two things about them;
they
wouldn't do an honest day's work in the summer sun and their hair's so long their necks wouldn't get
red
anyway."
"When Fidel Castro was launching his offensive
in the hills of Cuba, the
New York Times called him the Robin
Hood of the Caribbean and we all know he is a
Communist."
"But if you had asked any cab driver in the
streets of New York City or Montgomery, Alabama
what they thought about Castro when the New York Times
was singing his praises, the cab driver would have told you that he was a
Communist. The cab
drivers know this by instinct. They
are everyday people like us who have fierce contact with life."
We had fierce contact with some contentiously
contested election
protests when I served on the Democratic Executive Committee of South
Carolina
in the 1980s and '90s, but never one as interesting as when Vic Rawl
made
his case for a new primary election for the Senate race. Rawl's
attorney argued that they did not have to prove corruption, but only
that
because the machines were unreliable, the outcome was not correct.
Rawl's
protest focused on the voting machines that leave no paper trail to
substantiate their reliability. The
Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines use software whose
reliability was criticized in the 2008 Presidential election race in
Ohio. Dr. Duncan Buell,
a mathematician and computer science
professor from the University
of South Carolina
testified that" "We should treat these machines with an enormous
amount of skepticism."
Rawl's protest claimed that: the machines are
susceptible to accidental or intentional modification,
alteration or tampering; numerous voters experienced difficulty in
trying to
cast votes for Rawl; that the results cannot be verified; and that
inherent
unreliability of the machines constitutes evidence that the election is
invalid.
Big money controls politics. The US Supreme
Court has just ruled
in the Citizens United case that money counts as free speech. Money
talks in America.
If the votes were accurately counted, and the candidate who spent no
money on
media ads, signs, or a web site won, it would be a good thing for our
democracy.
When South Carolina seceded from the
Union in 1860, James L. Petigru, a former South Carolina
legislator and Attorney General
said, "South Carolina
is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum."
Considering our ragheads, rednecks and the Greene machines, Petigru's
description still applies.