Newt, Reagan and a Clemson joke: Notes from the campaign trail

I'm down in South Carolina this week, talking to voters and following candidates as we head for the Republican primary on Saturday. Some odds and ends from the road:

-- Candidates generally don't announce their vice-presidential picks this early, but Newt Gingrich has already made his selection: Ronald Reagan. With the former president being deceased and all, I'm not sure what federal laws might apply here, but I'm pretty sure Gingrich wants the Gipper on the ticket.

In his commercials you see him sitting next to Reagan, deep in conversation. In his speeches this week he's referred time and again to "the Reagan-Gingrich textbook" for turning around the country. He shared a Reagan bit on Jimmy Carter: If your brother-in-law is unemployed, it's a recession. If you're unemployed, it's a depression. If Jimmy Carter is unemployed, that's a recovery.

When the laughter died down, Gingrich said: "I may change the name but keep the story."

It can't hurt a Republican to align himself with the most popular Republican of our lifetimes. Of course, Reagan also (for Republicans, at least) projected warmth. Gingrich is still working on that warmth part.

-- It's hard to talk about how candidate spouses look and dress without sounding weird. So let me be delicate here. In person, Callista Gingrich doesn't look as... lacquered... as she does on TV. She sounded interested and engaged talking to voters one-on-one. Maybe she should spend a little time at the microphone.

-- It's early, but today is already showing how absurd the primary process is -- and how fast things can change. Mitt Romney became the prohibitive front-runner based on wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Except it turns out Romney didn't really win Iowa -- Rick Santorum did. And it also turns out that Rick Perry is dropping out of the race and throwing in with Gingrich. Perry didn't have a lot of support in South Carolina, but Gingrich doesn't need all that much to push out in front.

So basically, a few dozen votes in Iowa swung the race in one direction, and a couple thousand in South Carolina could swing it the opposite way.

Good thing that we don't have an ex-wife scandal to throw the whole race into a blender. Wait, what?

-- And in case you've missed it: Stephen Colbert wants to run in South Carolina but it's too late to get on the ballot. Herman Cain dropped out but it's too late to get his name OFF the ballot. So Colbert wants people to vote for Cain as a way to vote for Colbert. And to drive all this home, they're doing a rally together in Charleston on Friday.

Which is a long way of saying, I know where I'm going to be on Friday.

-- As important as this primary is, folks in South Carolina are still talking college football -- especially West Virginia's 70-33 beatdown of Clemson in the Orange Bowl.

Up in Pickens County, where Clemson is located, county GOP chairman Phillip Bowers is a Clemson grad. We were talking at Yank's Place in Liberty when his buddy Dan Crosby came over to chat. Crosby mentioned hearing that a friend was in Columbia the other day and remarked on how nice the weather was. "It's 70 here," Crosby said his friend told him. "But I hear it's 33 in Clemson."

Yeah, that bruise is gonna linger a while.










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John Spratt goes one more round

Readers: I'm writing about the John Spratt-Mick Mulvaney race in South Carolina... I'll have more tonight as the results come in. For now, here's a little bit from earlier in the day. -- TT

A black Prius pulled up to Cotton Belt Elementary in York, S.C., and John Spratt got out, hunched over against the chill.

Spratt woke up at 4:45 a.m. Tuesday so he could make it to the shift change at the Bowater paper plant. He had breakfast at Ebenezer Grill in Rock Hill to meet some more voters. And now he was out at the elementary school to cast his own vote, and campaign a little bit, and try to squeeze out a win with the political world tilted against him.

He and his wife, Jane, headed for the cafeteria to vote, and he gave a quick prediction: "It's a tossup."

Of all today's political face-offs in the Carolinas, Spratt's race against Mick Mulvaney feels like the one most closely tied to the country at large -- a Democrat in trouble, a Republican riding the hot issues, a veteran politician pushed to the edge.

Spratt was first elected to Congress in South Carolina's 5th District in 1982. Ronald Reagan was in his first term and Barack Obama was a college student. Spratt made friends, and built seniority, and now he is in a powerful role -- chairman of the House Budget Committee. Over the years he gained a reputation as a fiscal conservative, as a Democrat who could work with Republicans, and as a rare congressman known more for what he does than what he says.

But Spratt voted for the TARP bailout, and he voted for the stimulus package, and he voted for Obama's health-care plan, and now he's in political trouble. Mulvaney, a Republican state senator, has made a smart and unusual argument: He admits that Spratt has been good at his job, but he says that's not the case anymore. "Those times have changed," Mulvaney says, "and it's time for us to change congressmen."

Spratt wasn't helped by a terrible TV ad run in his behalf by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The ad portrayed Mulvaney as a villain who would make Social Security illegal and put your grandma in jail. No, really -- there was a picture of an elderly woman behind bars. The ad didn't come directly from his campaign, but either way, it was an un-Spratt way of doing business.

So now, as Spratt and his wife rode up to the school, they had to pass not just Mulvaney signs but red-and-yellow signs that say SACK SPRATT.

Spratt is South Carolina's last white Democrat in Congress. He's in a state that historically trends conservative, with a Republican (Nikki Haley) favored for governor, and a Republican lock (Jim DeMint) for the U.S. Senate. He's running in a year when Republicans expect to gain seats nationwide.

He's also fighting other battles. He's showing the early symptoms of Parkinson's disease; as he talks, his right hand shakes. He turned 68 on Monday, and he wears a hearing aid, and he has never been much of a grip-and-grin guy. He's earnest and he looks you in the eye when he talks. It's impressive face-to-face, but maybe it loses a little under the bright lights.

"You'll need a picture ID or your voter card," the guy at the polling place said, and everybody laughed because they all knew who it was. But he got out his ID anyway, and he and Jane cast their votes, and then he went around saying hey to everybody and asking about turnout. (At 11 a.m., in a precinct with 1,600 voters, more than 200 had voted and another 200 had voted absentee.)

"We've had good turnout so far, but I hope we get more, for democracy's sake and for my sake," he said. "It looks like it's going to be a pretty day. I remember some Election Days that looked a lot rougher than this."

Fourteen times in a row, Spratt has come away from Election Day a winner. What does he think about this time?

He looks away. Then looks back.

"I won't be surprised at anything."

Thoughts on Nikki Haley?

So I'm getting ready to spend a few days on the road, in preparation for a profile on Nikki Haley (the Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina, and the favorite to win).

Sometimes I go into this type of story with a particular angle in mind -- although often the reporting in the field leads me in another direction. This time, though, I'm pretty wide open. So I'd love to hear your thoughts.

What have you read about Haley (or the governor's race) that you'd like to know more about? What would like to know LESS about? And what do you think her candidacy says about politics in general, and South Carolina politics in particular?

Let me know what you think. And if you're interested in seeing Haley for yourself, she'll be at a rally in Rock Hill on Friday.

Alvin Greene, being there

Alvin Greene, the unknown, unheralded, un-everything U.S. Senate primary winner in South Carolina, kept reminding me of something -- and somebody. Finally figured it out.

If you've seen Greene on TV, you learn two things: One, his interviews set the Guinness record for awkward pauses, and two, it's clear he doesn't have a clue what's going on. All he does is repeat the same lines about "Sixty percent of the vote is no accident" and "I just conducted a simple old-fashioned campaign," which is especially funny because I'm still not aware of anyone in South Carolina who went to an Alvin Greene rally, or had Alvin Greene come to their house, or even saw him on the side of a road waving a campaign sign like those kids doing a car wash for the glee club.

He might have won the Democratic primary because he's black, or he might have won because he was the first candidate alphabetically, or he might be a Republican plant, but one thing is clear -- he didn't win because the people of South Carolina deeply desire to put him in Congress. Although they've probably done worse.

If you watch him on TV, you think, what a disaster. But when I figured out who he reminded me of, it started to make sense.

The 1979 movie "Being There" is about Chance (Peter Sellers), a gardener born with "rice pudding between the ears." All he can talk about is gardening. All he likes to do is watch TV. But through a series of events, he ends up in the home (played by the Biltmore House!) of a rich businessman with political connections. And so Chance the gardener becomes Chauncey Gardiner, whose empty-headed homilies about the weather sound like Zen in a different context.



(He also ends up in bed with Shirley MacLaine, who doesn't quite get what he means when he says "I like to watch.")

So it's possible we've misunderstood Alvin Greene this whole time. He might be our Chauncey Gardiner, our homegrown Zen master of politics, and we're just not deep enough to get it.

I will just add this. If he does ever hold a campaign rally, and it's by the side of a lake, bring your camera.