South Carolina, again
How did the Democrats get saddled with a Senate candidate who was busted on a porn charge?
South Carolina, again
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
So I vanish for 24 hours into the deep cool of the Blue Ridge Mountains, having assumed that South Carolina's political cesspool couldn't possibly be roiled again, but clearly I was wrong. I don't have the Guinness Book of Records handy, but it's probably safe to suggest that never before has the Democratic party been saddled with a U.S. Senate nominee who got busted for showing porn to a college co-ed.
Put your hands together for Alvin Greene. He has taught us that anything is truly possible in America - or, at minimum, in South Carolina, where a jobless guy with no money, no ads, no signs, no website, no organization, and a potential five-year jail stint in his future can somehow garner 59 percent of the vote in a Senate primary and thump his fully-credentialed rival. Unless the state Democrats can persuade Greene to quit (no luck so far), he'll face off this fall against Jim "Waterloo" DeMint.
Greene has been, and remains, virtually mute about most everything. But apparently he was quite specific during his encounter last November with the University of South Carolina co-ed. The student, Camille McCoy, told the Associated Press yesterday that Greene had sat down next to her in a computer lab and asked her to check out the porn on his screen. In her words, "I said, 'That's offensive,' and he sat there laughing...He said, 'Let's go to your room now.' It was kind of scary. He's a pretty big boy. He could've overpowered me." She called the campus cops and picked Greene out of a photo array. Greene has yet to enter a plea in the felony case; this week he said, "I have no comment on that negative story."
Yes, this is truly the year of the outsider.
I can't decide whether Greene is the worst Democratic candidate of the year. The guy who recently won the Illinois Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, he was pretty stiff competition. I mentioned Scott Lee Cohen back in February. Turns out he'd been arrested back in '05 for putting a knife to his girlfriend's throat. He'd also knocked his ex-wife around during a life phase when he was abusing steroids, and his own brother had successfully sued him for 200 large. But the big difference between Cohen and Greene is that Cohen bowed to the Democratic party's pleas and quit the race within days of winning the primary.
Two things are seriously weird about this story. Greene, who was reportedly booted out of the military, doesn't have a dime to his name - yet he somehow put up the required $10,000 to register himself as a Senate candidate. Where did the money come from? Greene says it came from his bank account; the problem with that story is, he was given a public defender in the porn case after he proved that he was indigent. (South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn says that Greene may have been a stealthily financed "Republican plant." Indeed, the fake candidate strategy is a time-honored South Carolina tradition. But that seems unlikely in this case. No Democrat, nutcase or otherwise, is going to beat Jim DeMint this year.)
But here's the really weird question: Why would 100,180 voters cast ballots in a Senate primary for a total cipher? Greene's Democratic opponent was a former judge and legislator, somebody with credentials and an actual track record. Are voters really so clueless or feckless that they would support someone whom they knew nothing about?
Or - given the fact that the state has an open primary, which may have tempted some Republican voters to cross over and boost Greene's tally - perhaps this is just a South Carolina kinda thing?
Ah, now we may be getting somewhere.
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The sole proprietor of this blog is on the road for the month of June. Virtually all June posts will be briefer than the norm, except on the rare weekdays when posts won't show up at all. Apologies in advance for this disturbance in the force. The standard verbosity will return on Monday, June 28.
Sounds like they are testing the script for The Distinguished Gentleman 2. I liked the first one.— puttinonthefoil
They're democrats, so of course they are "really so clueless or feckless that they would support someone whom they knew nothing about." That's the very definition of being a democrat, isn't it!
This is your typical Democrat candidate. He just lacks the union and special interest funding.- Saw the articles on this guy. Honestly I thought it was a hoax or something at first or that the news wires had just picked up a scam story from a prank site and run with it.— DAEnnis
Comment removed.- Maybe the other guy is so unpopular that people figured anyone would be better. Hard to believe the SC Democratic party didn't do any homework on the guy, though. They probably figured nobody was going to beat the Demintor so who cares.— yoda
- Yoda - From last. I agree with you. Oil companies drill where the oil is. My questions is why are they not drilling in ANWR which has 17 billion barrels of recoverable oil or NPR-A which has 12 billion barrels of recoverable oil???— Mike Welbourn
- Has Obama been on top of the oil spill since day one. Supposedly within days of the disaster the Dutch offered through official channels to the Obama Administration send 4 ships outfitted with some of the best oil skimming technology in the world. Obama turned them down. While there is the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 to deal with Obama could have been suspended it. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/7043272.html— Mike Welbourn
- It is a dem thing. By the way Dick "the non-oracle" Polman who gloated that Harry Reid got a "gift" with Angle being the repub challnger forgets to tell everyone the Angle is up by 11 points in the latest poll over Reid.— CD75
- Reid will bowl Angle over with his money like corzine did to christie.
- Mike, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is just that - a refuge for unique wildlife in a fragile ecosystem which experiences frequent severe weather. Allowing oil drilling there would create catastrophic disturbances which would be measured in centuries, if not millenia. In 1960, America decided that the value of such a refuge exceeded the potential value of oil, because the wilderness, once destroyed, cannot be recreated. I had thought offshore drilling was reasonably well understood so that it would not have similar effects in the ocean, but this spill has disabused me of that misunderstanding. If I was in charge I wouldn't allow oil drilling offshore either. We need to be working harder to find alternatives to oil, not working harder to find more oil to pollute the world with.— yoda
- yoda maybe you can use the force to turn windmills and burn solar arrays.
- "Or is this just a South Carolina kinda thing?" What elitist arrogance from DP. Yup, they're all yokels and hicks down there south of the Mason-Dixon, unlike the enlightened D politics in Philadelphia, where every D candidate is brilliant, attractive and with no criminal record. Actually, Ds in Philadelphia, it appears, often go into politics to gain a criminal record.— pj katauskas
- #3 - Regrettably, the Force, like tinkle-down and supply-side economics, the wisdom of the free market, and the enduring value of gold, is a figment of the imagination which was invented to make money from silly people.— yoda
- Well blowouts on land can typically be sealed in days. Well blowouts in a mile of water, well who in their right mind would ever believe it easier to seal a well at that depth? This disaster is simply another example of misguided environmentalists designing and implementing policies that ultimately cause more damage than they were meant to eliminate.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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