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The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer

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Pierce summarizes South Carolina:

In truth, it’s not easy to see what this does to the very top of the field. Even given the rebound she’s received in the wake of her handling of the murders at Mother Emanuel in Charleston, Haley’s endorsement is not likely to shake loose many of the people who have signed on with He, Trump and neither is it like to dislodge much of the support given to Tailgunner Ted Cruz by the substantial Bible-banging community throughout the state. And, in 2012, Haley’s endorsement of Willard Romney failed to keep N. Leroy Gingrich, definer of civilization’s rules and leader (maybe) of the civilizing forces, from gaining the only primary victory of his extended book tour. But what it demonstrably may be is the final shot below the waterline of Jeb (!) Bush’s floundering campaign.

Bush, it seems, romanced Haley hard. In another year, and with another member of the Bush family, it may even have worked. But this is the year in which He, Trump has pantsed Jeb (!) on live television a couple of dozen times. Cruz has beaten him to Gethsemane and Rubio is the new, fresh face that the national media is desperately trying to keep viable in the hopes that nobody notices that Young Marco is a big bag of feathers. That leaves Jeb (!) grappling with John Kasich for the ever-dwindling Not Insane faction of the Republican party, which doesn’t even exist down here, and Kasich at least is still a governor now. There is no rationale for Jeb (!) Bush’s candidacy, and it’s quite possible that there never was one.

It’s god’s own joke that the Bush family may pass from our politics in South Carolina. It was from here that came Lee Atwater, who ratfcked Michael Dukakis on behalf of Poppy in 1988. It was here in 2000 that C-Plus Augustus turned Karl Rove—an Atwater acolyte—loose on John McCain. And, in 2016, Jeb (!) may well end up life and death for fourth place with noted narcoleptic Dr. Ben Carson. The grotesquerie is glorious, a Southern gothic end for a dynastic political family, now rendered merely a curiosity, like a camel in the barnyard.

Zelizer elaborates on the historical background:

The brainchild of the South Carolina primary as we know it was the bad boy of Republican politics, South Carolinian Lee Atwater, who in 1980 elevated this contest onto the national political main stage. Before 1980, South Carolina selected its GOP nominee through a party convention, which had been controlled by Senator Strom Thurmond and his machine.

In 1979, Atwater, an up and coming political consultant, saw the caucuses and primaries had become the mechanism for picking party nominees, rather than the smoke-filled rooms of the party conventions, and concluded that it was time for South Carolina to join the primary fray.

But Atwater didn’t really want to give full control to the voters: He still believed the new primary system could be a vehicle for national party leaders to bolster their candidate going into Super Tuesday. He had seen how Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had challenged the major party candidates in 1976 by winning in caucuses and primaries as they appealed to Americans who didn’t ordinarily participate in politics and by using the news media to communicate directly to voters, bypassing party elites. South Carolina, according to Atwater, would be a way for the party establishment to gain control of the new primary process by having a state where it could counteract the free-wheeling decisions of earlier states.

So in 1979, Atwater worked with Republican South Carolina Congressman Carroll Campbell to push for a full-scale primary that would come after Iowa and New Hampshire but before Super Tuesday—both late and early enough to completely reset the trajectory of the primary race.

How was Atwater so confident his strategy would work? He knew that South Carolina had one of the most powerful Republican Party operations.

I am far from the first person to note the irony, but the forces Atwater unleashed to help turn the South Republican have swallowed up the establishment firewall he created in South Carolina.

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