A reader writes:
In your post you quote Jamelle Bouie as saying:
In the four presidential cycles where there has been a contested primary in South Carolina—1988, 1996, 2000, and 2008—voters have chosen the establishment candidate who went on to win the nomination: George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain.
Well, yes and no. Bouie makes a number of useful points in his piece, but this summing-up strikes me as a little misleading – both about South Carolina and about the main thrust of Bouie's piece. Republican primary voters in South Carolina didn't exactly "choose" McCain in 2008.
I think he got pretty much the same minority of votes as in 2000, but the anti-McCain vote (and a lot of it definitely was an ANTI-McCain vote) was fragmented among various other candidates running to the right of McCain. There seems to be a general consensus that if Fred Thompson had dropped out of the race, then Huckabee would have come out ahead of McCain.
In 2000, George W. Bush was definitely the establishment candidate, while McCain was the maverick. And by current Republican standards, Bush was presenting himself as a fairly "moderate" candidate (which turned out to be bogus, of course). But in the South Carolina primary that year, his campaign definitely portrayed him as being more right-wing than McCain, and as we all know, McCain was hit with a far-right smear campaign. Any South Carolina candidate who had to choose between Bush and McCain, and who was looking for the "most reactionary" candidate to vote for, would have voted for Bush – and they did.
And, in fact, Bouie's actual conclusion to his piece has a somewhat different slant from the quoted passage. This year, Bouie indicates, the great majority of South Carolina voters definitely ARE looking for the most reactionary Republican candidate they can find. Romney's good luck is that they have an embarrassment of riches in that respect – there are a bunch of reactionary candidates to split the anti-Romney vote … and, we might add, they represent different strands of reactionary politics, with Santorum at one pole and Paul at the other (and Gingrich off in his own orbit, as usual).
The Dish 