Alvin Greene is no Sarah Palin
When Olbermann asked Greene if he had had campaign rallies, he said, "Nothing formal. Just informal rallies. Just informal meetings, rather." When asked if he went door to door, he said, "I just conducted a simple, old-fashioned campaign, you know, all across the state of South Carolina." And yet no one had ever heard of him until Tuesday night, when this latter-day Chauncey Gardner took 60 percent of the vote.
Compare the reticence of Greene to the loquaciousness of Palin. The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee never met a run-on sentence or an odd metaphor she didn't like. Remember her resignation announcement last July? All that talk about full court press, passing the ball and how "only dead fish go with the flow." Talking Points Memo TV has a nifty compilation of "Sarah Palin's Greatest Hits." After watching it, I'll say this. Greene will never hold a candle to Palin. She has a worldview and something to say -- even if a lot of what she says is pablum.
By Jonathan Capehart | June 11, 2010; 12:43 PM ET
Mother Jones
Alvin Greene: Republican Plant or... North Korean Spy?
Conspiracy theories abound about South Carolina's political cipher.
By Suzy Khimm | Fri Jun. 11, 2010 4:00 AM PDT
Is Alvin Greene a Communist plant from North Korea? That’s at least what one casual observer believes, according to an email I received on Wednesday drawing attention to Greene's previous military service on the Korean peninsula. "All US Servicemen there are controlled by the 'crazy' people!" read the message. "It's a communist plot, soiled with the Greene plant!" This may sound loopy—but it's not that much more far-fetched than some of the theories flying around regarding Greene's improbable victory [1] in South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday night.
There are at least two key mysteries that state officials are trying to unravel. How did the unemployed Greene come up with the $10,400 filing fee required to run for office? And why did 100,000 voters cast a ballot for a total unknown who had no website, no party support and no visible campaign? Some are convinced that shadowy forces are pulling the strings. But hard proof of any foul play or outside manipulation remains elusive. And others who have met with Greene have come away convinced that he is the beneficiary—or victim—of circumstance.
Greene is also facing felony obscenity charges [2] brought against him in November. Former state Democratic Party chair Dick Harpootlian points out that he's being represented in this matter by a public defender—meaning he would have had to state that he didn’t have the funds to pay for his own defense. Yet four months later, Greene had somehow come up with the election filing fee, which he told me he paid out of his own savings. “He represented himself as indigent, at the same time that he’s paid a $10,400 charge for Senate,” said Harpootlian, a former prosecutor in Richland County, where Greene is being tried. The discrepancy raises two questions, Harpootlian said. Did Greene get the funds from an undisclosed source? Or did he misrepresent his financial status to the state during his arraignment in order to receive a free lawyer?
Harpootlian himself is quite familiar with his state’s history of dirty political tricks. More than a decade ago, he successfully prosecuted Rod Shealy, a Republican operative, for paying the filing fee for an unemployed black fisherman to run in a congressional race against Shealy’s sister. But there’s no obvious motive for such a ploy in the Democratic Senate primary, as incumbent Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is heavily favored to win re-election.
Possible shenanigans aside, nobody has yet figured out how Greene, who does not seem to have done any campaigning, managed to win 59 percent of the vote. Democratic Majority Whip James Clyburn has claimed that Greene must be "somebody’s plant" and said he'd received reports of a whisper campaign to vote for the first name on the ballot. "I'm told in a lot of rural communities, people were told, just vote for the first name on the ballot…that’s the kind of instructions that went out to people," Clyburn said in a conference call Thursday. He added that robocalling or a direct mail campaign may have been carried out covertly. But no one has come forward with any proof of such a scheme, and Clyburn said he had no idea who might be behind one.
Clyburn suggested that the Greene campaign could be part of a larger conspiracy [3] that included his own primary competitor, Gregory Brown, who ran unsuccessfully against him in the 6th congressional district. Clyburn alleges that Brown, like Greene, had failed to file his campaign spending reports with the Federal Election Commission, as required by law for expenses over $5,000. He estimates that Brown had spent than $500,000 on his campaign to unseat him, including broadcast television advertisements and signs—raising the question as to where the money was coming from. "There was something going on in South Carolina that was untoward," Clyburn said Thursday, on a conference call. "We can see our entire electoral process destroyed if we don’t do something about it."
But in the absence of any convincing evidence or motivation, other state Democrats are becoming increasingly skeptical of such theories—and increasingly concerned that Greene is not fully cognizant of his own situation. He seems completely overwhelmed by the flood of attention, not all of it positive: on top of the conspiracy theorists, the mother of Greene's felony accuser has vowed to wreak havoc [2] upon his campaign, as she told Mother Jones this week. Democrat state Rep. Bakari Sellers, who met with Greene on Thursday, said that he didn't believe the unlikely candidate was a plant. “I think he just kind of doesn't know what he's getting into," Sellers told Talking Points Memo. TPM continues [4]:
Todd Rutherford, another Democratic state representative who met with Greene today alongside Sellers, told TPMmuckraker, "Before I got to my third question, I could tell that something was awry," adding, "I don't know whether everything is OK."
Rutherford, an attorney, said that if Greene were his client, he would move for a mental evaluation. "If there's a joke he doesn't get the joke. If someone paid him to do this, they certainly exploited someone who is vulnerable. It's not even funny, it's just sad."
On election night, I was among the first reporters to speak with [1] Greene after his victory was announced. His verbal tics and strange affect were immediately apparent: he frequently repeats and interrupts himself, speaks haltingly, and sometimes descends into incoherent rambling [1], as subsequent video [5] and audio interviews have made all the more obvious. In his interview with Keith Olbermann on Thursday, he had great difficulty answering the most basic of questions, seeming to take cues from his attorney off camera [6]. There are still plenty of questions about his decision to run for Senate—perhaps less about any shadowy operatives than his own state of mind.
Who Is Alvin Greene?
| Tue Jun. 8, 2010 7:59 PM PDT
Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. "It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed," said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.
"It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much," he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren't relevant. "I'm not concentrating on how I was elected—it's history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what's going on, in America."
The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. "No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision," he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. "I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining," he says. "I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track." But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: "nothing in particular...it's just, uh, nothing in particular." South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.
Greene has yet to speak to any Democratic officials, either. After filing to run, his campaign went dark. According to this report, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April and didn't file any of the required paperwork for candidates with the state or Federal Election Commission. When I spoke to him, the state’s Democrats had yet to contact him after his victory was announced.
Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."
Sen. DeMint, a Tea Party darling and leader of the GOP's far-right flank, wasn't expecting a competitive challenge this election cycle. But conservative activists are already thrilled to see the Democrats' hand-picked candidate go down in flames. “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha,” tweeted Tea Party activist and Redstate blogger Erick Erickson after finding out about Greene’s victory.
Greene offered no volleys against DeMint, and he seemed to have more questions than attack lines when it came to the Tea Party. "What's the Tea Party’s position on wars in the Middle East? …I want to know the Tea Party's position on the wars in the Middle East?" he asked. But Greene says that he's excited about the prospect of taking on DeMint in the public arena: "I'm looking forward to the debate this September." DeMint and his supporters are no doubt looking forward to it too.
Update: Via the AP, Greene is facing a felony charge for allegedly showing obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student. The mother of Greene's accuser has launched a crusade against him, vowing to become the candidate's "worst nightmare."
Update: Greene was also kicked out of the Army and the Air Force. And the increasingly bizarre circumstances surrounding his campaign have prompted some Democrats to accuse him of being a plant—and others to question his mental health.
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