South Carolina, the troublemaker

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Throughout its troubled, troubling history, South Carolina has been America’s agent provocateur, a political troublemaker vastly out of scale to its ranking as the nation’s 26th most-populous state. Today, with South Carolina’s primary around the corner, its role of national turd-disturber is heightened by the fact that since 1980 every successful Republican nominee for president has won the South Carolina primary.

South Carolina’s role as national bellwether bad-boy was cemented long ago, in 1861, in fact, when unionist attorney James L. Petigru, possibly the last sane man in antebellum Charleston, complained about his state’s secession from the American Union, decrying, “South Carolina, too small to be a republic, too big to be an asylum.” It should thus be no surprise that this coming Saturday, a tiny number of South Carolinian Republicans have the opportunity to place their loony imprimatur on the upcoming national election.

The fight that just won’t die

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Gore Vidal tells of an apocryphal pilgrimage each April 12, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs, Ga. The trek, organized by the Dutchess County New York Republican Central Committee, supposedly wends its way up the old Albany Post Road from Poughkeepsie to Springwood, FDR's beloved Hyde Park home. According to Vidal, the mythic mission is meant to reassure twitchy Republicans that the 32nd president still rests in something approaching peace at the Hyde Park Presidential Library -- that he has not risen for some new 21st century "rendezvous with destiny."

Fable or not, Roosevelt's mythic resurrection is not just a wisp-of-the-political-wind. Today, perhaps more than any time in generations, the American right seems unable to rest easy until all vestiges of the social welfare programs associated with FDR's New Deal are dead and buried with him.

More imposing (if less charming) than Roosevelt's Hudson River home and library, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto is Hyde Park's physical, political and spiritual antipode. Ten miles from California's restless Pacific coast, the 25-story sandstone Spanish-Colonial Hoover Tower is the tallest structure on the forearm of the Peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. It is part of Stanford University's campus, and it is home to the intellectual cream of the New Deal-phobic American right.

Salon.com > Richard Rapaport

South Carolina, the troublemaker

The fight that just won’t die