Direct, rigid and to the point, former judge and state legislator Vic Rawl of Charleston announced today that he has begun a campaign to try and knock off Republican Jim DeMint who is up for a third term in the U.S. Senate this November.

A no-nonsense former circuit court judge and hard-charging state representative who pushed for lobbying reform in South Carolina during the ‘80s, Rawl, 64, said his campaign will be about problem solving, not partisanship.

“I am not an ideologue,” he said at news conference at the state Democratic Headquarters in Columbia. “I do not revel in gridlock. I believe that loyalty to our state and our nation comes before loyalty to our party.”

Rawl said the health-care reform bill in Congress “needs to be passed. Period.”

The biggest problem Rawl has with DeMint is that he doesn’t seem interested in South Carolina. Rawl called him an “absentee senator.”

“He spends a heck of a lot of time running around the country raising money for issues he is concerned about,” he said of the senator who was elected in 2004. “He is apparently at this point in time more interested in the opposition to Governor Charlie Christ in Florida than he is in interested to getting jobs to South Carolina.”

Rawl says he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to raise the kind of money that DeMint has and will be continue to raise – already some $3 million.

He questions where much of that money originated.

“Quite frankly I think a lot of the citizens of South Carolina are going to be much more in interested in where that money came from and to whom [DeMint] is beholden than how much he’s raised,” Rawl said. “And I fully intend to make that an issue.”

Asked if he expected the help of third-party advocacy groups in his campaign against DeMint, he said, “Yes, sir, I do.”

Asked if he cared to name any of them, he said, “No, sir, I don’t.”

Rawl said he has not read The Family by journalist Jeff Sharlet that exposed a group of fundamentalist leaders in Washington, D.C. who share a house on C-Street there where DeMint has stayed. While that book was not on his reading list he did say that he’d read about 260 others this year including titles such as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill.

Sharlet will be a guest discussing his new follow-up to The Family about C-Street on the local radio show “U Need 2 Know” with host Frank Knapp Thursday at 5:40 p.m. on 1230 AM, WOIC Columbia.