It's been four years, but it might as well be yesterday. Oh, wait, it was yesterday. South Carolina Nikki Haley is beating Democratic contender and state senator Vincent Sheheen to a pulp, while Sheheen tries to defend himself by proving he's not really a Democrat.
Sheheen is throwing around big hard-to-understand words like "ethics" while Nikki keeps talking about "jobs." Listen, Vincent, nobody really cares about Nikki's dirty dealings -- these are the people who voted Mark Sanford into office, and then re-elected him and then sent him back to the US House of Representatives. Don't you get it when you get those blank looks when you talk about "ethics?" All your talk about ethics reform got nothing but hot air from your friends across this aisle this past legislative season. What I'm saying is, you should take that as a hint.
Meanwhile, Nikki is the expert at quick, snappy words like "jobs." She has been selling out South Carolinians for what seems like forever, giving away millions of tax dollars to bribe businesses into town. Boeing has been her mantra. And Vincent doesn't seem to be there when it comes to running down the figures. She's quick to tell you how many jobs she created, but not how many of them were good paying and upwardly mobile. And why isn't Vincent talking about how much it's cost us in tax dollars per job? Or why that money wouldn't have been better spent on teachers' salaries?
And as far as the cyberattack on our tax records, Nikki has had no problem turning that into a win. She apologized (sincerely...) and we all got a year of free credit monitoring. We got over it; maybe it's time for Sheheen to talk about the other dumb ways Haley is pinching our pennies.
The Medicaid expansion is a primo example. Except what's sad about that is that when Sheheen brings up Haley's refusal to accept federal money to insure the thousands of uninsured, he twists himself into a pretzel to deny that by promoting this he is backing President Obama.
And Nikki has a blast blasting Vincent for his "hypocrisy on social issues." What she means of course is that Sheheen doesn't really support gays or women's reproductive rights, but he wants our votes anyway. Same for unions. And because he is refusing to take a Democratic stand on these issues, she is able to slam him for hypocrisy.
And in the ultimate irony, our own Jim Clyburn says, "To me, Sheheen is as conservative as anybody else." If this is the endorsement from one of South Carolina's most influential Democrats, well, I guess Sheheen really doesn't need any enemies.
So what we have is two anti-gay, anti-women, anti-union contenders for the governorship. One of them knows exactly what we want to hear ("jobs") and the other keeps trying to tell us he's going to deliver something different.
And what I'd like to know is, when are we going to get a Democrat to run for governor?
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