Archive for March 9th, 2011
David Beasley: The Price of Vice in South Carolina, Part II
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 03/09/2011
Part I explained how Democrat Senator gave up his Senate seat in 2004 because he spent years getting more extremely liberal in an attempt to get the Vice Presidential nomination.
I decided to write on this subject because it is so neat and probably unnoticed by anyone else: in the same general period exactly the same thing happened to another popular politician on the Republican side.
David Beasley won the governorship in 1994. His margin of victory was provided by those who were in favor of keeping the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina State House.
But everybody knew that he, like Hollings, dreamed of a vice presidential nomination. South Carolina politics is like a small town, everybody knows this kind of thing.
But the next convention was in 1996. Beasley, who had won the governorship on the strength of the pro-Confederate flag vote, needed to become part of the New South fast.
Beasley was elected governor in November of 1994. He needed every day he could get to switch sides. So in December, before even taking office, he turned on the pro-Flag voters.
Why? Because, as Beasley said, the Lord came to him and told him, at the ideal political moment, that the Lord wanted him to change sides. He announced this at the Baptist Convention in Columbia that month.
SC voters are often stupid, but they aren’t actually unconscious.
It is interesting that not one single public figure denounced t his move. They all depend on that I Have Found God crap to excuse them when THEY get caught.
In fact, only one semi-semi-semi-public figure in SC called Beasley’s action by its dictionary definition: Blasphemy. But the Columbia newspaper has quit publishing my letters since then.
Bob Jones IV, who had switched sides on the flag in time to keep his family business afloat, had also quoted scripture for it. The scripture he quoted was almost two thousand years old, but when you need to switch to the money side, any excuse will do as well as any other.
Again, Beasley tried to sell in a buyer’s market. There are a thousand sellouts for every slot.
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