The story of the night is not the outcome of the Arkansas Democratic senate primary but the South Carolinian one. A black, unemployed veteran, who raised no money and spent no money, had no website, no signs, no ads, and didn’t even file mandatory FEC reports, is destroying Vic Rawl. Vic Rawl has a website. Vic Rawl has a political biography. He would have been an underdog against Jim DeMint, but he would have been a serious challenger. It’s unclear how this all happened, but people have been wondering about the mysterious Alvin Greene ever since the Columbia Free Times wrote about him on May 19th.
At the end of a dirt driveway off a dusty highway in rural Clarendon County, just outside the town of Manning, a lawn overgrown with weeds sports no campaign sign for the man living in a house there who has filed to run as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate.
The candidate, a 32-year-old unemployed black Army veteran named Alvin Greene, walked into the state Democratic Party headquarters in March with a personal check for $10,400. He said he wanted to become South Carolina’s U.S. senator.
Needless to say, Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler was a bit surprised.
Fowler had never met Greene before, she says, and the party isn’t in the habit of taking personal checks from candidates filing for office. She told Greene that he’d have to start a campaign account if he wanted to run. She asked him if he thought it was the best way to invest more than $10,000 if he was unemployed.
Several hours later, Greene came back with a campaign check. The party accepted it, and Greene became an official candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was eager to have his picture put on the party’s website to show he had filed, says state Democratic Party executive director Jay Parmley.
But that was the extent of his campaign.
Though he says he is running, and running to win, Greene has not taken the steps one might expect from an active candidate — some of them required by law.
He has not filed with the Secretary of the Senate, according to its Washington, D.C. office. Nor has he filed any disclosure reports with the Federal Election Commission, which the FEC requires by law.
No campaign signs appear around the area where he lives, and Greene admits he hasn’t taken in any donations.
When the South Carolina Democratic Party held its convention in April, Greene did not show up.
Reached by phone May 12, and asked how he thought his campaign was going, Greene said, “So far, so good.”
And the amazing thing? He was right. He won the election.
I don’t know which Republican handed this man $10,400 to file as a candidate, or how much extra cash he received to carry out the task. But I don’t imagine that they ever imagined he’d actually win. This has all the makings of a movie script. All Alvin Greene has to do now is employ the same brilliant campaign strategy to unseat teabagger extraordinaire Jim DeMint. He can just hole up in his parents’ house, leave the lawn unmowed and offer down home political advice to any reporters who call him on the phone.
Asked if he thought it was a good investment to spend so much of his own money in a two-way Democratic primary to run against a popular Republican with millions in campaign cash, Greene replied: “Rather than just save the $10,000 and just go and buy gasoline with it, just take [it] and just be unemployed for [an] even longer period of time, I mean, that wouldn’t make any sense, um, just, um, but, uh, yes, uh … lowering these gas prices … that will create jobs, too. Anything that will lower the gasoline prices. Offshore drilling, the energy package, all that.”
He’ll win (again) in a walk, and Mr. Greene can go to Washington. You want the money taken out of politics? This is the man for you.
