BY: M. TOMOSKI
Jesus! The road weaved downhill for the last twelve miles, transport trucks threatened to flatten us against the sediment, and the sign at the end of the road read, “Jesus Saves!” as we left the Smokey Mountains behind in a treacherous veil of fog. God’s country at last; the mighty South where the state line was marked by Confederate flags and the church of your choosing could be found just around the corner. If you’d missed your first opportunity to kneel in prayer, you could bet your soul that there would be another chance to get acquainted with the lord in about a quarter mile.
Palm trees and willows lined every street and swayed to the sound of church bells. That was the smooth southern charm of South Carolina. A state where all of America’s natural wonders, from snow-capped mountains to the sandy coast, gathered to form a singular beauty that’s enough to make you wonder why anyone ever bothered to go west.
But enough about nature. Let’s get back to the meat of it; to the lowest form of politics there is: The First in the South Primary. After all, that was where pollsters were hired to misinform thousands of residents and derail John McCain’s 2000 campaign by claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child – the horror!
After following the same stump speech across the country for weeks, South Carolina jolts reporters out of a drowsy stupor with the promise of sunny weather, damn good BBQ, and “blood sport”. The last of which I can’t even claim as my own clever turn of phrase. It’s the reputation of the state and a warning from Governor Nikki Haley as she stood in front of cameras with a hint of pride and claimed that she wore heels, “not for a fashion statement,” but because, “you got to be prepared to kick at any time.”
Ted Cruz and his disciples were just about to start kicking at Mutt’s BBQ in Easley where I sat down to a massive plate of smoked pork and watched as a crowd of veterans and seniors formed a line across the centre of the dining area waiting to take their place among the wrinkled sea of grey that gathered in front of the stage in the next room. What followed was a slow moving exhibition of the Senator’s childhood and an appeal to the crowd by three of his finest friends in Congress who spoke as if they had to remind everyone why they had come.
We had all been promised some real action, mudslinging horror and morally questionable behaviour. But watching Cruz wait and grin on the sidelines as his friends from the Senate waved the silverware around and told stories of how Teddy had been, “spoon-fed the bible” as a child only served as a reminder that the closest thing to a political blood bath that week was a report that the campaign had mistakenly hired a porn star to be in their newest ad.
Shoved against the back wall with the press lights shining down our necks and the ceiling fan blowing hot air around the room I could hear the sound of a man’s voice encouraging his friends to work their way toward the reporters.
“I don’t know who they’re with, but I’m pretty sure they don’t lean this way” He laughed, “so feel free to lean on them.”
This has potential, I thought, it was finally going to get interesting. All it took was for someone to get nervous enough to grab at a camera or start throwing elbows around and we would have everything the Governor had promised.
After millions of viewers had tuned into the debates to watch the candidates hurl personal insults back and forth it was beginning to feel like it might be reasonable to expect a fist fight. There was nowhere else to go from here. Trump had set the bar for sleazy politics too high and too soon for South Carolina to have any real effect on the tone of the campaign.
So I sat in purgatory between a man in a fishing jacket covered in campaign buttons and another who wore a pair of Cruz shoes around his neck emblazoned with with a photoshopped portrait of the Senator and the words, “Blacklisted and Loving It.”
This was the general wisdom around the Cruz camp: that the most well-hated man in Washington who had gathered everyone’s grandparents at Mutt’s to hear a recycled speech from Iowa was a rebel.
I could almost hear the words before they were spoken. In just a few moments Ted would tell the crowd in a down home comforting tone that Planned Parenthood was an organization which, “chops up babies and sells their parts for profit.”
These were the real dirty tricks of the South Carolina trail. Not smear tactics or whisper campaigns, but lies delivered straight to the voters.
Pro-life advocates have every right and reason to believe that Planned Parenthood provides an unsavoury service to women across America. But Cruz was basing his opinion of the organization on a video in which anti-abortion activists tried to incriminate Planned Parenthood’s employees by offering to buy fetuses. That was the message Cruz was selling across the country even as the video’s creators David Daleiden and Sandra Meritt were being indicted in the Senator’s home state of Texas for spreading misinformation.
But it had all been said before in Iowa and repeated in New Hampshire. So I packed up the rest of my plate and headed North to see Donald Trump in Gaffney. Besides, Cruz wouldn’t throw a real curveball until a day later in Myrtle Beach where he floated the idea of turning Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson into a high level diplomat.
“Imagine for a second Phil Robertson, Ambassador to the United Nations. How much would you pay to see the Russian Ambassador’s face when Phil says, ‘what is wrong with you people?”
“Imagine for a second Phil Robertson, Ambassador to the United Nations. How much would you pay to see the Russian Ambassador’s face when Phil says, ‘what is wrong with you people?”
If this was the sort of thing we could expect from Cruz’s White House, it may be in the best interest of national entertainment to allow him to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice as well.
Ever since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on Feb 13th, Cruz had spent his air time suggesting that the nomination of a new judge should not be turned into a political spectacle. To hear Cruz tell the story you had to believe that the President was about to betray the whole country by doing his job.
“It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don’t do this in an election year.” Cruz said repeatedly.
But hold on a minute there Teddy. The last Supreme Court Justice to be appointed this close to a presidential election was Justice Kennedy in 1988 and he was appointed by Cruz’s own idol Ronald Reagan. After all, what better way to remove a new judge from the chaos of low-down and dirty campaign politics than to allow a President who isn’t running for reelection to make the nomination?
But, of course, none of this is about keeping politics out of the Supreme Court. The conversation that has hovered around Scalia’s death has nothing to do with respect for the late justice. In fact, it’s hard to believe that anyone on either side of the field had any respect for the man when his replacement was being considered before his funeral arrangements. A funeral which both Ted Cruz and President Obama didn’t attend. Instead, the debate has everything to do with the fact that a conservative Supreme Court Justice died at a time that was opportunistic for the President and inconvenient for Ted Cruz.
Meanwhile in Gaffney, it felt like someone backstage had been told to drop the needle on Forty Licks and let the record spin through all of the Stones’ greatest hits.
Hippies, fratboys, farmhands, textile workers, students, and southern belles were packed into the warehouse by the thousands, eagerly awaiting the Don.
Restlessness was beginning to take hold. “I hear he makes them all wait like this.” One supporter said as I asked if she would consider voting for one of the other candidates. “Bush is a sissy — and Cruz, he puts his hand on the bible one minute and lies the next.”
But even she was beginning to feel the fatigue of the same old story being told from town to town.
“I’ll tell you this though,” she said, “Trump’s got to change it up or people are going to get tired of hearing the same old thing.”
I leaned in to hear the woman’s muffled words as they gave way to the drone of Van Halen’s Right Now and the announcer called everyone’s attention to the stage : “Ladies and gentlemen…DONALD TRUMP!”
Like a hairband on its farewell tour Trump took requests from the audience and threw in a few of the most nostalgic moments from his victory in New Hampshire.
“Tell us about how you’re self-funding.” One supporter shouted.
But Trump wanted to talk about the Granite State and its people, their support for him, and their battle with crippling drug addiction as he delivered the same speech he would give again a day later:
“I am going to create borders. No drugs are coming in. We’re going to build a wall…Believe me, I will solve the problem.”
Mexico and Colombia are the main source of heroin in the US, but demand is being fuelled by increasing addiction to prescription drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin. According to the Centre for Disease Control, “45% of people who used heroin were also addicted to prescription opioid painkillers” and those who are most likely to abuse heroin are people addicted to painkillers and those without proper medical insurance.
While the number of people treated for heroin addiction in New Hampshire for the last ten years rose by 90 percent, that same number among prescription drug abusers was 500 percent. So while the Granite State may have a heroin problem, its roots spread firmly into an industry that’s home grown and perfectly legal. Yet the only mention of pharmaceuticals in Trump’s speech that night in Gaffney was about how he would make access to these drugs easier.
South Carolina was meant to be a viper’s nest. A pit of dirty tricks that makes dogfights look like an Easter morning egg hunt in the Rose Garden. But for a campaign that burst through the door with a rotten tone, thanks to Donald Trump, there wasn’t much lower the candidates could sink. Instead, the dirtiest tricks in the South were hurled at the voters when the candidates lied their way across the trail and played to people’s fears in order to sell the circus.
