Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Strange Case of Alvin Greene

By now you're probably familiar with the controversy swirling around the South Carolina Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate in which a completely unknown candidate named Alvin Greene who, in the words of Ann Coulter:

...beat Vic Rawl, a former state representative and judge, with a whopping 60 percent of the vote in last Tuesday's primary, despite Greene's having no job, no house, no campaign website, no campaign headquarters -- indeed, no campaign. Other than paying the $10,000 filing fee, Greene seems to have put no effort into the race whatsoever.

Moreover, Greene has a felony record for showing obscene pictures to college girls.

The left is in a tizzy, alleging everything from GOP dirty tricks to faulty voting machines to explain Greene's win. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Greene was not a "legitimate" candidate and called his victory "a mysterious deal."

I don't know why there's such consternation over this. The obvious explanation is probably the correct one, to wit, in any given election most Democrat voters have no idea who or what they're voting for. They just pull the lever for whichever name sounds most fetching and go have a beer. In the present case, Greene is black so word of mouth probably spread through black communities that he's the guy to vote for, so they did.

That may not be what happened, but it makes a lot more sense than that the guy is a Republican plant (even if he is that doesn't explain why 60% of Democrats voted for him) or that, in an election for the privilege of being clobbered in November by the GOP incumbent, Jim DeMint, Republicans would risk scandal by somehow tinkering with the voting machines.

It really is a shame because when you hear Mr. Greene talk he sounds like a man who is marginally retarded, but the Democrats are stuck with him. They really can't take the nomination away from a poor black man and give it to an upper class white guy like Rawls without getting hammered for the implicit "racism" in such a tactic.

Anyway, as Coulter suggests, it's not the first time it has happened that a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history came out of nowhere to win an election.

RLC