House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

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House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby compared2what? » Fri Jun 11, 2010 2:35 am

And it does look pretty odd, you gotta admit. So. First:

    No-Name, No-Campaign Candidate Takes Dem Nom In SC-Sen Race

    Alvin Greene is an unemployed veteran who has never held political office. After filing for the Democratic primary in the Senate race from South Carolina, his campaign seemed to stop. There is no Alvin Greene web site, no Alvin Greene bumper stickers, no Alvin Greene yard signs. There's not even an Alvin Greene FEC filing.

    Nonetheless, Greene won last night's Democratic primary, beating Vic Rawl, a judge who served in the South Carolina legislature for four terms. A judge who had gathered $186,000 for the campaign.

    "I wasn't surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much," Greene told Mother Jones.

    Greene, on the other hand, didn't raise a dime. In March, he walked into the state Dem headquarters and handed over a personal check for $10,400, the filing fee to run in the Senate race. The chairwoman, Carol Fowler, was taken aback and told Greene he needed to start a campaign account and write the check from there. A few hours later he came back with a proper check, according to the Free-Times, and filed.

    After that, nothing. Fowler says Greene didn't show up at political events, including the convention. Rawl has never seen him.

    But somehow, Greene took 59% of the vote last night and will face Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) in the fall. There was, by conventional wisdom, little chance Rawl could beat DeMint, who has millions of dollars to spend on a campaign and is popular in South Carolina.

    Fowler speculated to the AP that Democratic voters unfamiliar with both Rawl and Greene chose Greene because he appeared first on the ballot.

(LINK)

Then it turned out he's not just an unemployed guy with no political history or campaign living with his parents who beat the party-backed candidate for that district. He has an outstanding felony obscenity charge for showing some nice Southern college girl dirty pictures or something, too! (Reported details are a little hazy). Then two state level Dems met with him and concluded that he was "mentally impaired."

Anyway. Here is pretty comprehensive (if catty and small-minded and sadistic and incurious) WaPo profile of the guy, who -- of course -- caught on with the media bigtime when they found out about the felony charge.

And here's a really painful interview he gave to Olberman:



Like Olberman says, Rep. Clyburn is charging that three non-party-backed Dem. candidates in S.C. were somebody's plants. Here, again, is a little WaPo rundown on the state of play.

But basically, all three candidates are black, none of them appears to have any campaign funds. Two of them (Greene and the somewhat more personally credible surprise winner in the 6th District, Benjamin Frazier, Jr) scored out-of-the-blue upset victories over the party-annointed pick that everyone expected to win the primary. And one of them, who ran against Clyburn himself, lost.

But this to me is the true WTF of the whole thing:

Greene is running for Senate against incumbent Jim Demint, who is, was, and always has been going to win no matter what. It's South Carolina. That seat's simply not open to a Democratic challenger, no matter who he or she is, it's not like if the party's guy (Charleston attorney and ex-state legislator, Vic Rawl, who is an actual politician) had won, the GOP would have had a race on its hands. So why would they plant a plant?

Yet that's sure what Greene (at least) looks like.

I can think of two (or maybe one-and-a-half) hypotheticals:

    (1) It's a prank aimed at punking Obama by some seriously racist but not seriously political group.


    (2) It's the Ron-and-Rand-Paul/Tea-Party way of saying "Fuck you" to Clyburn, who's not only the third ranking majority member of the house but also head of the Black Congressional Caucus, in which capacity he was very critical of Rand Paul's remarks on the Civil Rights Act.

I know that the latter seems more likely. But that's really only because I can dream up some way of filling in the details a little. They're both purely speculative, the truth could be either or neither.

Also, fwiw, according to Greene's wiki entry, he got a BA in PoliSci from the University of South Carolina, then served as an intelligence specialist and unit supply specialist with the U.S. Army until last year when he was honorably but involuntarily discharged.

That's special blinking text, denoting "known RI interest area," btw.

Anyway. I have no idea what's going on, but whatever it is, it looks pretty vile. And also like he's being used/controlled/blackmailed/something-ed by somebody. To me and Rep. Clyburn both.

What do you all think? Helter Skelter time or what? Have things really gotten that bad?
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jun 11, 2010 9:25 am

Clyburn says S.C. Dem Senate candidate a 'plant'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28501
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby barracuda » Fri Jun 11, 2010 11:01 am

Let's say Greene is a plant. How did an unknown get 59% of the votes? Through some sort of fraud, or via an underground campaign? How many votes does 59% in that race mean, anyway?
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby anothershamus » Fri Jun 11, 2010 11:49 am

Thanks compared2what? for getting this out.

barracuda wrote:Let's say Greene is a plant. How did an unknown get 59% of the votes? Through some sort of fraud, or via an underground campaign? How many votes does 59% in that race mean, anyway?


Let's guess what type of voting process they had, Machines?, most probably. If this doesn't get the vote fraud out in the open I don't know what will. It is silly that the democratic party asked him to step down, they should have filed fraud charges against him and whomever funded his 'campaign'.
)'(
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:07 pm

Oh, shoot, the answer to this is easy--the Republicans crossed over in masses to vote for him, thus ensuring a TERRIBLY weak candidate to run against their guy in the fall.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby anothershamus » Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:11 pm

chiggerbit wrote:Oh, shoot, the answer to this is easy--the Republicans crossed over in masses to vote for him, thus ensuring a TERRIBLY weak candidate to run against their guy in the fall.


How did they get the word out to vote for that guy in the first place, word of mouth? They would also have to be registered Democrat to vote for him in the primaries. It was a manipulation of the machines! Had to be!
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:15 pm

They do that here in Iowa all the time, I hear, and we have caucuses, which means they have to show up in person and sit through the whole process to do it. The funny thing is, I think those Republicans crossing over here may have voted for Obama the last time, thinking he was the weaker candidate.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:17 pm

They would also have to be registered Democrat to vote for him in the primaries


I don't think that's so in South Carolina.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby jfshade » Fri Jun 11, 2010 1:51 pm

barracuda wrote:Let's say Greene is a plant. How did an unknown get 59% of the votes? Through some sort of fraud, or via an underground campaign? How many votes does 59% in that race mean, anyway?


S.C. does have an open primary. Here are the vote totals:

Registered Voters: 2,585,911
Ballots Cast: 622,810
Voter Turnout: 24.08 %

Ballots Cast - Republican (REP)
424,893

Ballots Cast - Democratic (DEM)
197,380

Alvin M Greene (DEM)
58.96% 100,362

Vic Rawl (DEM)
41.04% 69,853

Jim DeMint (REP)
82.99% 342,464

Susan McDonald Gaddy (REP)
17.01% 70,194

source
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby jfshade » Fri Jun 11, 2010 2:11 pm

By way of comparison, in 2008 McCain beat Obama in South Carolina by 54% (1,034,896) to 45% (862,449). I don't see clear evidence of massive Republican crossover in the numbers for Greene. I haven't looked at a county breakdown, so I don't know about weird patterns there - as often happens when tampering occurs - but I did notice that no county had turnout exceeding 40%.

I am very skeptical of the "first name on the ballot" argument. I expect some inchoate anger at politicians in general may have focused on Rawl. But c2w's blinking text blinked right out at me, too, when I encountered it.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby compared2what? » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:30 pm

elfismiles wrote:Clyburn says S.C. Dem Senate candidate a 'plant'
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... =8&t=28501


Oh, I am SO SORRY, elfismiles.

I looked through the first two pages of GD for it, but I guess aliens abducted me so briefly that I didn't even notice I'd lost the time I otherwise would have spent noticing you had a thread on the topic already or something.

IOW, I don't know how I managed to miss it. But I send both my apologies and my mad props to you. It was entirely unintentional. Though also entirely my failure.

So no harm, no foul, I hope,
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:39 pm

"Its all good" c2w ... you added your own info/insight (whereas I just did my usual info-driveby) and that wins hands-down in my book. Just wanted to point out the link to the rawstory version of the same news story - part of my maddening-RI-indexing obsession.

Peace!

compared2what? wrote:
elfismiles wrote:Clyburn says S.C. Dem Senate candidate a 'plant'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28501


Oh, I am SO SORRY, elfismiles.

I looked through the first two pages of GD for it, but I guess aliens abducted me so briefly that I didn't even notice I'd lost the time I otherwise would have spent noticing you had a thread on the topic already or something.

IOW, I don't know how I managed to miss it. But I send both my apologies and my mad props to you. It was entirely unintentional. Though also entirely my failure.

So no harm, no foul, I hope,
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:41 pm

I expect some inchoate anger at politicians in general may have focused on Rawl.


Well, there's likely a lot of that going around. I'm left of center, and I'm in the mood to vote the assholes out.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:43 pm

I've thought all along that Democrats have totally underestimated Scot Brown's win. They're not listening.
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Re: House Whip Alleging Conspiracy (and Shenanigans) in S.C.

Postby compared2what? » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:51 pm

chiggerbit wrote:Oh, shoot, the answer to this is easy--the Republicans crossed over in masses to vote for him, thus ensuring a TERRIBLY weak candidate to run against their guy in the fall.


But why would they bother doing that, chig? The seat is securely DeMint's, if Rawl had been the challenger, he just would have gotten the pro-forma party loyalty vote, whatever that is.

And Greene won't even cut into that number on more than a one-time basis, Because the party's made it crystal clear and then some not only that they don't support him, but that they want to get rid of him.

Furthermore, whoever planted him made no attempt AT ALL to plant him on the Dems thoroughly enough for him to put down roots, if you know what I mean. He didn't attend any party functions, or even so much has have a quick cup of coffee and a plate of grits with anyone attached to the world of official SC Democratic partydom.

And all of that would always have been destined to come out and become pretty much universal knowledge as soon as news of the felony charge hit.

Basically, it's a very big drag for the Dems. But it's not really a lasting injury or embarrassment for them. It was a stealth victory, they obviously had fuck-all to do with it and weren't expecting it, and they were going to lose anyway.

So assuming he was/is a plant, why would whoever planted him go to the trouble?

Cui bono?

(I reluctantly ask like a mindless automaton. But since that really is the question to which I don't see any clear answer, I'll just have to learn to live with that, I guess.)
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