“The hallmarks of the South Carolina dirty tricks are: high impact, low tech, high deniability,” said Joel Sawyer, a GOP consultant based in Columbia. “The more salacious the better. And the people that do these kinds of things know their audience -- they are going to play to the fears of the blue-collar South Carolinians and know these tricks are going to be impactful.”Curiously, it's also the state where candidates -- and, presumably, voters -- get the vapors when people use bad words:
The late GOP campaign consultant Lee Atwater is remembered as the patron saint of aggressive South Carolina politics. In 1980, he used push polls to link Democratic congressional candidate Tom Turnipseed to the NAACP -- a scary notion for some white suburbanites -- and spread rumors that as a depressive child Turnipseed had been “hooked up to jumper cables.” Atwater later became an adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and chaired the Republican National Committee.
His tactics are still very much in play. It feels like just yesterday when anonymous phone calls went out around the state asking primary voters in 2000 if they would be “more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if [they] knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”
Mr. Rubio expressed disgust with Mr. Trump’s use of obscene language earlier this week, describing how his two young sons had watched a news clip of Mr. Trump insulting Senator Ted Cruz on the eve of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. When the boys, age 8 and 10, asked their father what word had been bleeped out, Mr. Rubio said, he was at a loss.Meanwhile the head of Jeb Bush's communications team is trying to paint Rubio as anti-family because he denounces certain aspects of pop culture despite being a self-proclaimed hip-hop fan, as noted in a McClatchy article:
“The commentator said it was another word for cat,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview on Thursday aboard his campaign plane, which touched down here for a rally. “My boys wanted to know, ‘What was the word? What was the word?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ I had to make something up. And it bothered me.”
“I think you can be a straight talker,” he added, “but yet do it in a way that doesn’t offend.”
MCCLATCHY: Family values? Marco Rubio hates hip hop, except when he loves ithttps://t.co/fEeVfc3m8R
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) February 12, 2016
@gabrielmalor no. Highlighting phoniness. I respect liking NWA. But dont lecture abt music values with SoCos & then brag about NWA with GQ.
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) February 12, 2016
Why do dirty tricks and loud proclamations of "family values" coexist so well in South Carolina?
I'm a Northerner. I say if a state or locality is going to be nasty and sleazy, it should be that way across the board -- don't craft the best sleaze and then act all holy the next day.
Bless your heart, Steve...
ReplyDeleteDon't you know that acting all holy is what Southerners do when someone does something they do every day, but that they don't approve of when someone else does it?
It's the mark of the faux-"Christian!"
On Sunday at church, they repent their sins of the past week.
And, no sooner do they exit the church, then they start gossiping, and working on new sins for the following Sunday.
Victor is spot on. I'm a Northwesterner who lived in SC for five years, including in 2000. The South is the land of no shame. I actually had to turn off my hypocrisy meter while I lived there, so deep was the bullshit.
ReplyDeleteSpot on, Victor. One of the worst backstabbings I ever suffered was at the hands of a sweetness-and-light Carolinian.
ReplyDelete“My boys wanted to know, ‘What was the word? What was the word?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ I had to make something up. And it bothered me.”
ReplyDeleteI told them it means "Someone who is too cowardly to hook jumper cables up to a brown man's testicles." and the kid just shrugged and said, "Oh you mean a faggot?"