NOW IT’S OUR TURN!

by Charles Bierbauer

The presidential campaigns arrived in South Carolina this week in a muddle and a hurry. Thank you Iowa and New Hampshire.

It would have been a shame had those two idiosyncratic states pushed a pair of snowballing races our way with any notion of inevitability in deciding the two candidates who will face off for the presidency in November. Fortunately, our votes will matter. As will Florida’s and those cast in more than 20 states on Super Duper Tuesday, as we are now calling February 5.

Quirky Iowa surprised us with victories by Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Barack Obama. Crusty New Hampshire turned nearly conventional with wins for the once putative front-runners John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Good thing.

The founding fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution with the intent of ensuring that small states would not be obscured in the electoral process. But the framers of the Constitution could not have envisioned that by the time the neighborly voters of the 30th largest state had caucused and the bundled electorate of the 41st state in size had held its primary, that the pundits and pollsters would call the race and dismiss the rest of us. Hey, we’re the 25th largest state! Thank you Iowa and New Hampshire for your decisively indecisive handoff.

Of course, this does mean South Carolinians now have two weeks of bombardment by the candidates’ multimedia ads, two more televised debates, even more lawn signs and all those annoying campaign phone calls. But only two weeks. It will go quickly, and then we’ll likely not see another candidate the rest of the year.

I’ve started getting several calls a day from political reporters in other parts of the country or just across town. They ask how South Carolina’s African-Americans will vote. Will black women vote for Hillary or Obama? Will whites vote for Obama? They certainly did in Iowa and New Hampshire. Can John Edwards win his home state? Will religious conservatives vote for Huckabee, Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney? My answers range from “I don’t know” to “it depends.” Then we do nuance.

Nothing is as simple as black or white voters, red or blue states. South Carolina may be a red state in November, but in January it’s got two primary colors and a significant number of magenta independents who could be tempted by Obama to vote Democratic or lured by McCain or Rudy Giuliani to vote Republican. Independents will have to decide whether to vote on the 19th for a Republican or on the 26th for a Democrat. Let’s see, which day am I in town? We don’t make it convenient, do we?

Is an African-American woman more likely to vote for Clinton because she’s a woman or Obama because he’s black? Would it make a difference if the voter were a younger or older woman?

John Edwards won the South Carolina primary in 2004, but that’s no reason to think he will win in 2008. It’s a different cast of competitors, not the distant John Kerry of 2004, but the accessible Barack Obama and the familiar—thanks to Bill—Hillary Clinton. Edwards may have been born here, but he didn’t grow up here, didn’t make his millions here, didn’t get elected to the Senate here. How many votes is the coincidence of birth worth?

Republican candidates, in contrast, have courted religious and social conservatives. Last year we witnessed the paradox of the president of Bob Jones University endorsing Romney, even while denouncing Romney’s Mormon faith. Many conservatives held their breath waiting for Thompson to give up “Law and Order” for the campaign trail, then wondered why they hadn’t taken a deeper breath. Enter Baptist preacher Huckabee to a chorus of Hallelujahs. Who will get those votes on the 19th?

McCain, like Edwards, has been here before. Unlike Edwards, McCain was treated harshly and slanderously through Bush campaign dirty tricks in 2000. Might South Carolinians think they owe McCain a fairer shake?

The good news is we’ve still got choices. And now it’s our turn.
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Charles Bierbauer covered five presidential campaigns for CNN from 1984 to 2000.
Some of them brought him to South Carolina. He is now dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina, though the opinions here are his own and not those of the university. Bierbauer is senior contributing editor and a consultant to SCHotline.com

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