We are not South Carolina. I’m sure you join me in my relief in confirming that.
I admit, though, to some ambivalence. As a political columnist, I sometimes despair at our state’s determined political normalcy, if you don’t count the occasional legislator’s concern about people marrying horses.
You’ve probably heard the latest from South Carolina, where the hits keep coming like so much oil from the BP gulf well, except much dirtier.
South Carolina Democrats have picked as their U.S. Senate nominee an unemployed veteran named Alvin Greene, who doesn’t have a campaign website or, for that matter, an actual campaign. He has yet to hold a rally. He has yet to raise a nickel.
What Greene does have — aside from 59 percent of the primary vote — is a felony charge for allegedly showing a University of South Carolina student obscene images, apparently as a pick-up technique.
It’s either funny or sad. If you watch his TV interviews, it’s mostly sad. Greene said he left the service “involuntarily.” And though it took a while for anyone to notice — Walter Shapiro has an interesting piece in the Daily Beast on the costs of newspapers cutting back on political coverage — Greene qualified for a public defender, leading some to ask where he found the $10,400 filing fee.
There’s even a suggestion that he might be a Republican plant, and while that sounds like a bad plot line — no Democrat is going to beat Sen. Jim DeMint, after all — there is actual precedence for this in South Carolina. Someone placed an African- American plant in a 1992 lieutenant governor’s race in order to spur the white vote. You could look it up.
Everyone’s looking for an answer to how Greene won. I’ve seen it posited that Greene — with an “e” — is a common black name that explains how he got black votes, even though no one knew who he was.
Maybe it’s just a fluke. This is what Greene told The Washington Post about the filing money:
“I saved the money from the Army,” Greene said. “Army, Army, Army, Army money. My personal Army money.” Then, he asked: “Can I get paid for this interview?”
Before Greene, the big story was gubernatorial candidate and Sarah Palin favorite Nikki Haley, who is often described as Mark Sanford’s protege, although not his soul mate.
Two Republican operatives, in what must be a maybe-kiss-and-tell record, claimed to have had affairs with Haley. She denied both charges and said she’d quit if they were proved true, which would, at least, put her ahead of Sanford.
Meanwhile, a Republican state senator called Haley a “raghead” — referring to her Indian Sikh heritage — which even in South Carolina was way over the top.
Haley got 49 percent of the vote. She’s in a runoff and is the heavy favorite, although I wonder what the over-under is on unsubstantiated adultery charges before the vote.
You see what we’re up against in Colorado. How do we compete?
For comic relief, we have Doug Bruce, who is apparently in hiding in his basement. He has dodged subpoena servers and others who want to know whether he wrote the three strangle-the-government initiatives on the November ballot. He must fear that if voters find he’s involved, they might think the initiatives are as strange as they think he is.
It’s gotten so bad, Attorney General John Suthers is apparently taking time off from the repeal-health- care-reform lawsuit to work on a contempt-of-court motion against Bruce.
Usually we have to rely on minor gaffes for our amusement, like Scott McInnis’ elk-meat-for-the-poor campaign. But we have, at least briefly, hit the big time with Dangle-gate, in which Andrew Romanoff admitted he had been dangled job possibilities by the Obama administration if he didn’t run in a primary against Sen. Michael Bennet.
It would have been a better story if it hadn’t been a throw-in after the Joe Sestak job-dangle in Pennsylvania — or if anyone had actually noticed it when The Denver Post reported it in September. This was a delayed-action nonstory story, but it did prompt Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to take a closer look at Romanoff.
Milbank began by noting that Romanoff was the “prickly” editor at the Yale Daily News when Milbank was a cub reporter there. As a former cub reporter, I can say that this presents a rare and rich opportunity.
Milbank slammed Romanoff for saying that Bennet is corrupt for taking PAC money since Romanoff had taken PAC money himself when he was Colorado House speaker. Milbank called Romanoff’s charge cynical, which is a fair point; I’ve written it myself. But in the wide, wide world of nasty politics, it’s relatively low-level cynicism. You can hear far worse in Washington every day.
Still, I’m heartened to see someone out there taking Colorado political shenanigans seriously. I mean, it can’t always be about South Carolina.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
