"We knew that providing them with a operating base in Jim DeMint’s senate office that could be held without expending any resources would spread DeMint’s Disease throughout the republic faster and more virulently in the dangerous atmosphere of anger and frustration empty pockets and racial paranoia produce." Read the full post on how people in SC attempted to stop DeMint so you won't hate us all.
Jim DeMint’s two most recent national embarrassments appear to be equally offensive to Republicans and Democrats. He’s announced he’ll be blocking passage of any matter the Senate proposes to approve by unanimous consent (which means the Majority and Minority leader have both approved it) that he hasn’t been given 48 hours to clear. He has decided to object to the established procedures in the middle of session, a stumbling economic recovery and two wars, instead of any time in the previous five years. He’s also gotten in a snit with other Senators about the Alaska primary and some incendiary fundraising communications in which he’s attacked the Republicans in the Senate, claiming they’re not supporting the tea party candidate who won the nomination.
I’m from South Carolina and I worked extensively with all three candidates the Democratic Party hoped would stand up and challenge Jim DeMint in this general election. Mike Ruckes, an African American, was a well meaning former union member and executive in the automotive industry who had never run for public office. He chose not to file with less than ten thousand dollars in his campaign fund.
Chad McGowan was a successful Attorney with thin Democratic credentials who spent three months building a campaign which raised several hundred thousand dollars before he pulled out because he didn’t feel he could raise the funds necessary for an effective challenge. If Chad wasn’t a hard core Democrat when he started, the campaign effort made him into one. He ultimately concluded that DeMint’s combination of tea party zeal and big corporate money was a toxic combination for our State and the Country.
Finally, Vic Rawl a respected former Judge, Legislator and current member of Charleston County Council picked up the flag in early March and ran as hard as anyone could, raising a quarter of a million dollars, until he was defeated by Alvin Greene in the Democratic primary. The Rawl effort was all consuming for dozens of volunteers. It brought in national talent and drew on a large number of recently trained volunteers. It was an imperfect effort carried forward by very dedicated people. It would have been better with a lot more money and time. What was striking was that on many nights over a third of the people working for Vic were unemployed. It was a battle waged in the wasteland of one of the worst economies in the United States.
Alvin Greene won for one of two reasons and no one will ever know for sure which the actual cause was.
Many election experts are convinced that there is a 95% chance that the voting machines were manipulated. It’s perfectly clear that security, electronic isolation and random audit standards for the use of this paperless voting system were not followed on election day. Many of the machines were not kept in controlled environments and could have been accessed by large numbers of people. Some machines were left connected to the internet, in strict violation of the manufacturer’s instructions. The practice of removing random machines from the precincts on election day and then feeding them audited dummy votes to be sure they’re reporting the votes punched into them correctly was apparently not done.
It’s possible the machines were programmed to randomly switch votes so Greene won. The machines were wiped clean shortly after the primary to be used in runoff elections, however, it’s quite possible they were programmed to erase any code enabling vote manipulation immediately after voting ended by themselves.
It is also 5% possible (according to the experts) that large numbers of voters simply picked a familiar sounding name from the ballot, the first listed. Nearly all the attention in the state had been devoted to the competitive race for the nomination for Governor and most of that media attention had been devoted to Republican candidates. The universal assumption was that Vic Rawl would win the primary. There was no organized support for Alvin Greene within the Democratic Party. I’m pleased to say that the voting for Greene does not appear to have been racially motivated. There is no correlation between the number of African American voters in an area and how well Greene did.
Absent some eruption of a confession from someone who was paid to fix an election, we’ll never know. Even then, it’s unlikely there is a scrap of physical evidence to support such a confession. Given how dangerous it would be to do it and how few people on earth would be able to do it, they’re likely to have been well paid and be willing to keep their mouth shut if they exist. They may not exist. I don’t know.
We have one of two things. It could be an electronic manipulation which produced results which are 95% unlikely to have resulted from random voting. It could be proof that SC in now 95% strange. Maybe there is no difference between those two things that matters.
Alvin Greene isn’t fit to be a US Senator, unless he sits next to Joe Biden and raises his hand when Joe puts a flash card in front of him. Some people are voting for Greene anyway, seeing that as a loyal Democrat’s protest vote in support of President Obama. Others are voting for Tom Clements, the Green party candidate, an antinuclear activist.
DeMint is simply ignoring the election and his opponents. He’s currently involved in a fight with the Charleston business community about his refusal to seek earmarks to dredge Charleston Harbor that’s rhetoric is so dishonest I can’t sort it out. Most of the people he is making angry are Republicans. There is no indication DeMint cares. He's vacuuming up right wing money and dropping it all around the country. He doesn't spend much time in South Carolina.
Many of us devoted large parts of the last two years to keeping Jim DeMint from returning to the US Senate, or at least pulling him off the back of other Democrats and even Republicans across the country by forcing him to fight us here in SC. We worked long and hard, dug into our pockets and soldiered through an atmosphere where the rest of the country had largely written us off as being the home of Governors who hike to their mistresses, Lt. Governors who propose to starve children and married Comptrollers who text 400 word love letters to other Republicans running for statewide office on their Blackberry.
We read DeMint’s unreadable book. We understood that DeMint was the perfect tool for the large, moneyed interests now fully unleashed upon our politics. We knew that providing them with a operating base in DeMint’s senate office that could be held without expending any resources would spread DeMint’s Disease throughout the republic faster and more virulently in the dangerous atmosphere of anger and frustration empty pockets and racial paranoia produce.
I know for certain that this is true, a few dozen people working as hard as they can, backed by a few hundred thousand dollars cannot stop Jim DeMint. Alvin Greene certainly won’t. There are a lot of things I would have done differently and some very important things that other people should have done differently. However none of those people could print money and none of them could work more than about 18 hours a day.
We're phone banking for other campaigns now. It's a huge, well coordinated state wide effort.
The Democratic party is better organized here than it has ever been here in the last 20 years. It isn't broke. Headquarters have been opened across the state. There are lots of paid field organizers out there. Events are being held. Money is being raised. Had the effort against DeMint not been aborted, it would have been more than a nominal problem for him.
We had hoped to stop DeMint, or at least slow him down, for South Carolina’s sake and the nation’s. We couldn’t get that done. The rest of you, outside South Carolina, will need to do something.