Mitt and the fire eaters

The famously Unionist South Carolina native James Petigru once opined to a visitor that his home state was too small to be a republic, but too large to be an insane asylum. The notion that South Carolina is kind of wacky persists, but its reputation for wackiness depends less on outright corruption and more on the defiant, unreconstructed nastiness of the prevailing ideologies. South Carolina tends toward extremes, and tempers can get hot quickly.

So when correspondent Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times writes that South Carolina is “a place famous for surfacing the dark undercurrents of American politics,” there is some historical validity to the assertion, although Mr. Rutenberg’s construction of things strikes me as little more than a dog whistle for the average Manhattanite who might happen on to his news analysis. After gently touching on the things that make South Carolina what it is, at least, in his telling of it, Mr. Rutenberg does end up defaulting to the economy as the most likely driver of sentiment. After all, the state is an economic mess with no obvious catalyst for growth. It has one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S., and despite some recent good news, like the establishment of a new Boeing facility in North Charleston, large swathes of the state are poor and getting poorer.

Despite Mr. Rutenberg’s “dark undercurrents,” South Carolina’s Republican primary will turn on perceptions concerning the economy and the unusually focused concentration that Republicans in the state have on putting forth someone “electable.” The fire eaters are willing to swill Mitt’s tonic for fear of having four more years of taking Mr. Obama’s medicine, and those who prefer a different flavor aren't sure which bottle to pull down from the shelf, thus dividing the remaining vote among three or four candidates.

Given that the average man on the street in Columbia or Charleston would be hard pressed to describe what it is that a private equity firm does, I suspect Mitt is all but assured of winning the election in South Carolina. It won’t be as sweeping a victory as New Hampshire, but he will avoid the fate that befell John McCain in 2000, when the state’s party machinery smashed his front-running campaign to bits in favor of a candidate (George W. Bush) whose conservative Republican bona fides were purportedly more established. Mitt is not a shoo-in for the nomination yet, but South Carolina won't be the undoing of his campaign.