Politics as Entertainment: The Alvin Greene Story
H. L. Mencken wrote somewhere that Congress was worth the cost of its salary simply as a form of entertainment. I was reminded of that reading news stories about the outcome of the recent South Carolina Democratic primary, where an unemployed veteran with no background in politics won, by a healthy margin, the senate nomination. The Democratic establishment responded with outrage to this particular outcome of democratic politics. The losing candidate strongly hinted at evidence of vote fraud, while one prominent congressman implied that Greene was some sort of Republican plant:
"I know a Democratic pattern. I know a Republican pattern, and I saw in the Democratic primary elephant dung all over the place,"
It's possible, as some of the Democrats claim to believe, that Greene was persuaded to run by someone working for the opposition party, but that doesn't explain his winning—he apparently did no campaigning and ran no ads. My own guess is that it was a random fluke. The Republicans were expected to win the election, so the Democratic nomination wasn't a big issue, so nobody paid much attention to it. Greene won either because voters liked his name, because they disliked the other candidate and, knowing nothing about Greene because they had never heard of him, had nothing against him, because his name appeared first on the ballot, or for some other reason I haven't thought of.
Whatever the explanation, watching the Democratic party, state and national, try to wriggle out of an outcome of majority voting that they don't like, at least provides the rest of us with some entertainment.
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"If I was runnin' f'r office, I'd change me name, an' have printed on me cards: 'Give him a chanst; he can't be worse.'"