Over on the home page, a look at what’s driving Nikki Haley’s surge in South Carolina. Sure, it helps that Sarah Palin endorsed her, that she’s a solid conservative, and that she’s young, attractive, and charismatic. But ultimately, she represents a cry of “ENOUGH!” to the state’s political establishment, a heavily GOP coterie that seems to avoid the consequences of lawbreaking, reaches into the public purse to create jobs for family, ignores the basic democratic requirement of recording votes, and attacks any serious challenger with increasingly outlandish smears.
UPDATE: A reader in South Carolina calls attention to another interesting race in the Palmetto State:
I was a little surprised that, in your wrap-ups of yesterday’s primaries, you didn’t note that Tim Scott came in first in the GOP primary for SC
CD-1, and is in a runoff with Paul Thurmond. Scott is the first serious black Republican candidate in SC that I can ever recall and, if he wins, would be the first black Republican Congressman for SC since Reconstruction. On top of that, he is an impressive guy and a solid conservative and would make a much more effective spokesman for the GOP with minorities than Michael Steele has turned out to be. I can see the national media ignoring the story about a conservative black Republican winning in SC, but I’d love to see the more conservative parts of the press emphasize his rise.
An Indian-American and an African-American winning two of the top slots on the GOP ballot in South Carolina is remarkable. And, yes, I did vote for both of them.
I initially thought, “Yeah, but there’s still that runoff”, but I now see Tim Scott led the field by quite a large margin, 31.5 percent to Thurmond’s 16.5 percent.