I know that he’s John McCain’s echo and ambiguously single to boot, but just his eleventy billion appearances on cable television alone should assure that Sen. Lindsey Graham gets more than zero percent in the national polls. Of course, he tried to go toe to toe with Donald Trump and he’s still looking for his ass and formatting his new phone.
I guess you can’t go around advocating that we wage war in a dozen countries and then get pounded into Myrtle Beach sand the instant you step into the presidential fray. It’s bad optics, particularly if people keep asking about, you know, the wife or lack thereof.
Still, being a U.S. senator counts for something, and even if only four percent of South Carolinian poll respondents express an intent to vote for Graham in the South Carolina primary, that doesn’t mean people in the Palmetto State want to get on his bad side by endorsing or going to work for Ben Carson or Rand Paul or Marco Rubio or, you know, ad infinitum.
Could be that Rick Perry and Chris Christie are no longer relevant to this conversation.
And Graham wouldn’t be relevant either if his state didn’t come third in the nominating process.
But it does, and it’s making people down there a little annoyed that their terror-fightin’ senator won’t just face reality and drop out of the race.
“It is a precarious situation for people,” said Greenville-based GOP strategist Chip Felkel. “Whether he was ever going to become the Republican nominee or not, he’s still going to be a sitting United States senator.”
While elected officials often lock up the support of their state’s party establishment, South Carolina’s early primary makes the stakes higher.
“South Carolina is like Iowa and New Hampshire. The circus comes to town every four years, and you have a chance as an official or as an operative to become the next Lee Atwater,” said Bruce Haynes, president of the political consulting firm Purple Strategies. After working his way up in South Carolina politics, Atwater helped Ronald Reagan win the state’s primary and went on to become a presidential adviser and then chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Isn’t that cute how they all want to be the next Lee Atwater?
No one tell them that Atwater understood better than anyone that what he’d done was going to land him in hell.