I could not believe my eyes when I opened up this article in the New York Times that
says Tea Party henchmen are calling Sen. Lindsey Graham a “community organizer for
the Muslim Brotherhood.” Instead of putting his face on cartons of milk and asking where
the lost Senator has gone, the reasonable people of the state of South Carolina should
be applauding a Republican who sees immigration needs to be dealt with and is willing
to reach across the aisle to get something done. I’ll let you read this article and decide.
Challengers to South Carolina Senator Are Lining Up on the Right
Senator Lindsey Graham, shown in Washington this summer, has been criticized by some Republicans and targeted by Tea Party supporters.
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By KIM SEVERSON
Published: August 25, 2013 27 Comments
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LAKE WYLIE, S.C. — Some of the early shots in the Republican primary battle against Senator Lindsey Graham have been fired from this tiny community on the northern border of the state where the Civil War began.
John W. Adkisson for The New York Times
Mr. Graham’s challengers so far in the Republican primary campaign include Nancy Mace, the first woman to graduate from the Citadel.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times
Another challenger, State Senator Lee Bright, tends to support extremely conservative legislation.
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A small group called Carolina Conservatives United, one of dozens organized loosely under the flag of limited government, low taxes and strict adherence to the Constitution, sent out images last week of a milk carton bearing Mr. Graham’s face and asked Gov. Nikki R. Haley to issue the state’s version of an Amber Alert to find its missing senator.
“Lindsey Graham has not been seen in the state of South Carolina for most of the last two years,” said Bruce Carroll, the chairman of the group.
Conservatives in South Carolina are eager to oust Mr. Graham, who has enraged the far right for, among other things, reaching across the aisle on immigration and supporting President Obama’s nominations for the Supreme Court. Tea Party supporters called him a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood when, instead of heading home for the Congressional break this month, he went to Egypt at the request of the president.
But to stand a chance against the politician who succeeded Strom Thurmond in 2003, conservatives will have to win a civil war of their own. At least 40 groups align themselves along Tea Party and Libertarian lines, and trying to unify them to topple the state’s senior senator will be no easy task.
So far, three people have stepped forward to challenge Mr. Graham in the June primary: State Senator Lee Bright; Richard Cash, a former Congressional candidate; and Nancy Mace, the first woman to graduate from the Citadel and, at the moment, the challenger whose political star is rising the fastest.
Ms. Mace, the owner of a public relations firm in Charleston, prides herself on her social media skills. She has never run for office, but her story is familiar to many here. For a time, she became the face of gender integration when she graduated from the Citadel in 1999, an experience she followed with a 2001 book, “In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel.”
Toughing it out at the formerly all-male military college makes her a perfect candidate for voters seeking a true conservative, she said.
“I feel like they are looking for someone who is very strong and who won’t waver,” she said in an interview last week. But Ms. Mace is also the biggest target so far, in part because of her connection to a political gossip Web site called FitsNews, which she helped create in her role as a Web designer and media manager.
Will Folks, once a press secretary for Representative Mark Sanford and a former political consultant for Governor Haley, runs the site, which consistently attacks the governor. In 2010, Mr. Folks claimed to have had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Ms. Haley two weeks before the election in her highly competitive bid for governor.
The claims were never proved, and Ms. Haley, who is heading into a campaign for her second term next year, has long said it was just another example of underhanded South Carolina politics.
Suggestions of a connection to the Web site can quickly throw Ms. Mace off message.
“My opponents’ political operatives have started smearing me,” she said. “I’m talking about all of them. It says more about my opponents than it does about me.”
The smears, she said, began in Mr. Graham’s camp two months before she announced her candidacy. The others have joined in.
One is Mr. Bright, who endorsed Ron Paul in the state’s presidential primary and has used the Web site connection to attack Ms. Mace. He has also been at odds with Ms. Haley over ethics changes and strategies to keep Mr. Obama’s health care law from being implemented in the state. Mr. Bright tends to support extremely conservative legislation and introduced a bill in 2011 to have the state create its own currency if the Federal Reserve system collapsed.
Ms. Haley said she was not jumping into the battle over who should replace Mr. Graham. Speaking this month at the annual Red State gathering, organized by Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative blog RedState.com, the governor said: “I controlled Tim Scott. We’ll see what you do with the other one.”
She was referring to former Representative Tim Scott, a Tea Party favorite she appointed this year to the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint, who left to head the Heritage Foundation.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, which Mr. DeMint founded in 2008, took on Mr. Graham last week for suggesting that a government shutdown as a way to fight the Obama administration’s Affordable Health Care act would be “a bridge too far.”
Mr. Cash, a businessman and a social conservative from Piedmont in the vote-rich upstate region, is considered a sleeper in the race, said David Woodard, a longtime South Carolina political consultant who ran Mr. Graham’s Congressional campaign in 1994 and wrote the 2006 book “The New Southern Politics.”
“You got to look at their money, and the guy with the most money is Richard Cash,” Mr. Woodard said.
According to recent campaign finance records, Mr. Cash had about $250,000, including at least $200,000 of his own money. Ms. Mace said she raised more than $100,000 in her first two weeks. Mr. Bright has not filed any campaign finance papers.
Mr. Graham has $6.3 million. Although he declined to comment on his opponents, his campaign staff pointed out that tough opposition in a primary is nothing out of the ordinary in South Carolina.
“Lindsey Graham is a strong fiscal, social and national security conservative with the record to back it up,” said Tate Zeigler, a campaign spokesman.
But Mr. Cash is staking out a position as the most anti-abortion, Christian constitutionalist in the race.
He is certainly the most seasoned campaigner among the challengers, even though his first race was not until 2010, when he was one of six Republicans trying to capture an open Congressional seat. Although he was not well known, he ran a disciplined campaign that moved him into a runoff against Representative Jeff Duncan, Mr. Woodard said.
In meetings with Tea Party groups, Mr. Cash repeats a carefully honed slogan about his candidacy, which he says is built on three C’s: capitalism, Christianity and the Constitution.
The state’s traditional Republican leaders and political consultants say that it will take a deeply unified effort to mount a successful campaign against Mr. Graham, but that in South Carolina, an unpredictable state with one of the country’s largest number of prominent Tea Party politicians, it is not unthinkable.
The key is for one candidate to find a way to harness that power.
“Anybody who wants to look at all those groups with a broad stroke should think again,” said Matt Moore, the chairman of the state’s Republican Party.
This summer, dozens of conservative groups talked about finding the state’s Ted Cruz — a reference to the Texas senator whose long-shot, grass-roots victory in 2012 is considered a model among Tea Party supporters.
It remains to be seen whom that should be, said Paul Anderko, the president of the GPS Conservatives for Action PAC.
“We know it’s not going to be an easy fight, and people are just listening and waiting to find the right candidate,” Mr. Anderko said. “But South Carolina is a funny state. Sometimes incumbents do go down in flames.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2013, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Challengers to a Senator Are Lining Up on the Right
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