U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson at a recent campaign event in West Columbia. File photo.

Wilson, Miller, Mulvaney and Spratt — it might sound like the name of a nefarious law firm out of a gritty crime paperback, but in South Carolina those are the names of four congressional candidates who, depending on which two win in November, could mean more for the future of the American experiment than perhaps any others in the Palmetto State.

Already the national media has taken a curious interest, training its attention on South Carolina’s second and fifth congressional districts like the searchlight of a slow-passing police cruiser. By October, the sirens should be wailing.

At stake is not just the congressional makeup of South Carolina, but also, to an extent, the prospects of President Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda and the future of Democrats in the South.

In both races, a long-serving incumbent finds himself in the fight for his life against a young, aggressive challenger. In both of them, that challenger is running for a completely different reason. And it’s all happening in a year where observers agree that anything can happen.

It might be tempting to boil each race down to two words: “Health care,” maybe. Or “You lie.”

But to oversimplify the races would do them each a great disservice.


A Tale of Two Districts

In the battle for the 2nd District, which stretches from parts of the Midlands down the Georgia border to the Southern coast, the congressional race between Republican Joe Wilson and Democrat Rob Miller has turned into the second-most expensive in the country and has already broken state records.

In upper central South Carolina, inside the 5th District that stretches from Gaffney to Dillon along the North Carolina border and includes all of Newberry, Fairfield, York and Kershaw counties, Republican Mick Mulvaney, a relative political upstart, is in a siege to topple John Spratt, a high-ranking 14-term Democratic incumbent who has held onto the district since 1982.

While each race contains different dynamics, key national issues have set the context for both. In the Wilson-Miller matchup, it all goes back to Wilson shouting at President Obama in the fall of 2009 during the president’s address on health care. And in the Spratt-Mulvaney contest, it’s all about conservative activists wanting to make an example out of a long-serving Southern Democrat who’s perceived as especially vulnerable because of his vote in favor of health care reform.

But while national issues have set the context, they won’t necessarily determine the winners.

“There’s national attention being paid to those two races,” says state Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler. “But I also think that those two races are going to be decided by South Carolina voters who — no matter what the Republicans try to stir up — don’t always vote on national issues. These two races I think are likely to be decided by people with a definite hometown South Carolina mindset.”

Regardless, America will be watching.


Two Words That Changed Everything — or Nothing at All

When it comes to the race between Republican Wilson and his Democratic challenger Miller, the debate about national heath care reform might as well have been the mold into which each campaign had been poured.

Democrat Rob Miller works the crowd at the Pelion Peanut Party festival on Aug. 13. Photo courtesy Miller campaign.

But, while that great national debate certainly set the context for the 2nd District race, it doesn’t appear that it’s playing out on the ground one year later.

“[Miller] doesn’t really get questions about health care; it’s mostly about jobs and education,” says the candidate’s campaign manager, Patrick Norton. “It’s rare that he gets a health care question.”

Meanwhile, at his own events, Wilson has been getting questions that range from his position on amnesty for illegal immigrants (he’s against it) and judicial activism (he’s a strict constructionist) to the U.S. ban on whaling (he’ll look into it), whether or not to tax dividends (he would reduce taxes on them), and whether to create more or less nuclear energy (he wants an all-of-the-above energy plan with a large nuclear component).

That isn’t how the race started.

On the otherwise quiet evening of Sept. 9, 2009, Internet cables all over the United States started lighting up and digital campaign cash began coursing into the coffers of Miller and Wilson and continued throughout the night. The money bombs started exploding shortly after Wilson, a relatively little-known Republican congressman from West Columbia first elected in 2000, blurted out a sharp “You lie!” at President Obama during a speech.

The president paused and the nation’s heart skipped a beat. It created an immediate liberal backlash.

Across the country, appalled observers flipped open their laptops to find out who Wilson’s Democratic challenger was and how they could donate money.

In Beaufort County, a fresh-faced Marine Corps veteran named Rob Miller was smiling.

His campaign quickly re-routed website visitors to his page at actblue.com, a national organization that functions as a conduit for Democratic candidates to raise money.

“When politicians have these political moments, these political flashpoints, we help them ensure that they don’t leave any money lying on the table,” says ActBlue communications director Adrian Arroyo.

He remembers the “You lie” moment vividly.

“It was probably one of the first truly viral fundraising pushes,” Arroyo says. “I think for about three hours on Sept. 10, [Miller] was taking in $1,000 a minute.”

In less than 48 hours, Miller raked in more than $1 million.

Two years before, Miller had lost to Wilson by eight percentage points, which was unexpectedly close given the conservative makeup of the district and Wilson’s four-to-one spending advantage. In a year with a young, fired-up Democratic electorate eager to cast their ballots for the country’s first black president, Miller received 46 percent of the vote that year — more even than Obama did in the district.

Miller had never been in politics before and had just come out of a career in the military. He was used to busting down doors in Iraq and storming buildings, not soliciting donations and schmoozing with party pooh-bahs. As a candidate, he might have been a little awkward. The campaign never seemed to convince the big Democratic donors that Miller could win, and his largely self-funded campaign spent most of its money on TV ads.

Lowcountry Democratic strategist Lachlan McIntosh managed Miller’s 2008 campaign, though he’s not on board this time around.

“I firmly believe that if the Democratic Party contributors funded Rob properly two years ago he would have won,” McIntosh says.

That, of course, was before those two famous words.

Wilson’s heckling of the president kick-started both campaigns much earlier than either had expected.

While Miller was making bank, Republicans scrambled to get behind the man who’d just stood up to Obama. In Columbia, Wilson supporters gave away T-shirts splashed with a defiant message: “I’m with Joe.” They used the two hastily shouted words not only to raise money, but to hoist up one big fat middle finger to the president and what they perceived as a radical, socialist agenda.

It worked. Money flowed in, and the contest turned into a race for national headlines.
In the months that followed, both campaign teams staffed up and courted more money and attention. They puffed out their chests and engaged in a kind of Cold War standoff — each candidate walking a tight rope between benefiting financially from the supercharged fringes of their respective parties and the reality of having to campaign in their district, where concerns were more focused on jobs than health care reform.

For his part, Wilson apologized to Obama for what he characterized as a spontaneous outburst. He said it was “inappropriate and regrettable.”

And the checks kept coming.

Both candidates traveled outside the state to raise money. Wilson went on a “Thank you” tour and made appearances in Michigan and Missouri. Miller held a $250-a-plate dinner in Washington, D.C. He also cracked an ice cube tray over the press by keeping his mouth shut to reporters for weeks.

“None of us ever imagined that our race would begin so early and on such a large scale,” Miller eventually told a McClatchy newspaper reporter when he finally decided to talk. “The game has changed. The campaign has changed.”
 

U.S. Rep. John Spratt. Courtesy photo.

A year later, Miller and Wilson are burning up money in an effort to show the voters in South Carolina’s 2nd District who better should represent their interests in Congress. Miller has already spent almost $800,000; Wilson has spent $2.3 million. With two months to go, they each have $1.7 million left to spend.

Miller already has a TV ad out blanketing the airwaves titled “Iraq,” which touts his military service.

Wilson has been spending money, too, but he’s also been pressing the flesh on a tour bus across the district where he stopped at small businesses to put on a uniform or apron and do shift work like he was starring in his own personal episode of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs.

The week before the bus tour, Wilson hosted about a dozen hometown cookouts. He’d get behind a grill and flip burgers. He’d wipe his hands off and pick up a microphone. He’d take questions and offer ideas for lowering the debt like eliminating the U.S. Department of Education amid swirling barbecue smoke and some of his biggest supporters.

Cal Coy, a retiree from Chapin who worked for 35 years in the railroad equipment business, has known the congressman since he started in politics. He’s watched the Wilson family grow up and believes he knows Wilson’s principles and the values he stands for. Wilson had spoken to Coy about the “You lie” incident after it happened.
Coy says Wilson had just read and re-read the several-thousand-page health care bill before listening to the president speak about it.

“What he heard was a blatant lie,” Coy says. “And if you know Joe Wilson, he’s not prone to make exclamations like that, but he — it just came out.”

Coy is sitting at a picnic table in the front row at one of Wilson’s hometown cookouts. He’s glad Wilson said what he said.

“In the long run, I think it woke a lot of people up,” he says, but offers that if Wilson had to do it over again he doesn’t think he would.

Wilson’s outburst came after the president said this: “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

According to factcheck.org, a leading nonprofit politics research project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Obama was correct. “Wilson certainly was out of bounds to call the president’s statement a ‘lie,’” the project wrote shortly after the speech.

Whether Wilson was right or wrong probably doesn’t matter. His outburst has already defined the race.

As Miller campaigned in the Midlands last month, he said he was confident that what will happen this November won’t be a repeat of 2008.

“I know that I’m going to run a competitive, aggressive race and I know that we’re going to win in November,” he said in the parking lot of Pelion Middle School during a peanut party festival the town held Aug. 13. “Congressman Wilson should be concerned that Rob Miller is running a campaign to unseat him.”

Republicans have attempted to paint Miller as a liberal, tying him to moveon.org, a group that donated several thousand dollars to his campaign and once famously paid for a full-page ad in The New York Times that called General Petraeus “General Betray us.”

The Wilson campaign has called the organization a “liberal extremist group.”
Miller kept the money, but he certainly hasn’t campaigned as a liberal or an extremist. If anything, he’s campaigning like a Blue Dog Democrat. A fiscal conservative, strong on national defense, Miller talks about balancing the federal budget more than pushing any progressive causes. He has a ticker of the country’s rising gross national debt on his website. He rails at Wilson for his vote on TARP — the Bush-era bank bailouts — and blasts him for accepting congressional earmarks. He says Wilson has “gone native in D.C.,” voted to raise his own pay five times and voted against combat benefits for troops in Iraq while using taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street. He talks about slashing congressional pay and job perks.

More than health care, Miller’s campaign manager [online copy corrected], Patrick Norton, says voters in the district keep bringing up bailouts. He says he doesn’t think Wilson wants to talk about it.

“I think he senses that it’s going to be a real big issue in this election,” Norton says. “A lot of people don’t like it. So he’s not going to want to talk about it at all and that’s unfortunate because the taxpayers do.”

On the economy, Miller sounds like he’s running to the right of Wilson, as if the race were a GOP primary.

Whether it will work remains to be seen.

Then, of course, there’s Obama.

The president has said that he understands there are parts of the country where his presence wouldn’t necessarily help Democrats running in certain districts.

Asked if he thought any Obama support would help or hurt him in his race, Miller looks off toward the roof of the Pelion Middle School and thinks for a moment.

“Well, I’m going to win on our own merits in the 2nd District,” he says. “And we don’t need anybody coming in to help us campaign.”

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler says she hasn’t heard of any plans by the Obama administration to get involved in any South Carolina races, although she says the door is always open.

“South Carolinians respond to South Carolinians,” she says. “This is quite a provincial state. We don’t look for outsiders.”


At the Corner of Congress and Liberty

There probably couldn’t be a more symbolic street corner in America to describe what’s happening in the midterm elections than in the re-election campaign of U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, a powerful 14-term Democrat who is facing a little-known Republican opponent, State Sen. Mick Mulvaney, in South Carolina’s 5th District.

Both of them are campaigning on a Saturday at the town of York’s annual Summerfest, a folksy downtown festival that literally takes place on the intersection of two streets named South Congress and West Liberty.

A deeply entrenched congressman, Spratt has been in the U.S. House for 28 years. Through five presidential administrations, he has represented a conservative district where a majority voted for every Republican president in the past three decades while re-electing him as their Democratic congressman every time.

By contrast, Mulvaney is benefiting from a conservative liberty movement and a rising tea party tide that’s crashing at the gates of incumbency nationwide.

Across the United States, Republicans are going to make huge gains in the U.S. House, predicts Winthrop University political scientist and pollster Scott Huffmon, who lives in the 5th District, but most of those gains are going to be made from open seats.

“Eighty-five to 90 percent of incumbents are still going to get re-elected,” Huffmon says, so you have to look at individual races. “Is the Spratt-Mulvaney race the one where an incumbent is doomed? Is it one where the incumbent is safe? No. It’s the exciting one to watch.”

In Washington, Spratt is a known workhorse and policy wonk with a searing intelligence and a record of constituent service that’s unmatched in the state.

“He’s just been very influential,” says Buddy Motz, the outgoing Republican chairman of the York County Council. “He’s a sharp, smart guy; very good financially, so that’s why I think he’s been very successful.”

Motz is sitting in a rocking chair on his back porch in Rock Hill, surrounded by hanging plants under a slowly swirling ceiling fan. He recently lost his own re-election campaign in the GOP primary against an under-funded political novice running to the right of him. There were major complexities in that race, but he says the tea party movement didn’t help.

Though he’s a Republican, Motz says he’ll probably vote for Spratt and knows plenty of others who will do the same.

“I just don’t think Mulvaney has the experience and the knowledge that would be a good replacement,” he says.

It’s a common tale.

Households across the district are full of stories about the grandmother who lost her Social Security benefits and called John Spratt to get it back. The daughter whose passport got messed up and called his office to fix it.

On this day, the people who tell those stories are everywhere around him as Spratt heads out campaigning how he knows best. Meeting people. Shaking hands. Being visible.

The 67-year-old senior member of the Armed Services Committee, whose father introduced the late Sen. Strom Thurmond to his second wife at this same festival many, many years ago, shuffles slowly through the crowd in khakis, a blue button-up shirt and a tan baseball cap. His hand shakes from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease as he sips from a bottle of water.

The people in Spratt’s district are angrier than he’s ever seen them. Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues across the country who found themselves in similar positions and decided to retire instead of fight out the blood sport in November, Spratt’s sticking it out.

In the past he has faced largely token opposition and was able to dispatch each candidate with ease. There was a close race during the Republican Revolution of 1994 that kind of woke him up, but that was a decade-and-a-half ago.

But this year, there’s just that something in the air, a low-frequency hum out there in the electorate that’s flashing like an electrical storm and whipping up a conservative base, one that’s been growing in the 5th District for years as its demographics have changed.

The area has become more conservative as thousands of new residents have moved down from just across the North Carolina border into in-district bedroom communities of Charlotte, largely because of lower taxes. The area has also shifted over the years from a textile economy to a more diversified one. For the past couple of years, York County has been the fastest-growing county in the state.


In a way, Mulvaney represents much of those changes. Originally from North Carolina, the 42-year-old attorney and land developer now lives in Lancaster County. His children go to school in North Carolina. In 2006, he became the first Republican to hold a state House seat in his district. A libertarian-leaning Sanford ally, he won a state Senate seat two years later when an unexpected retirement created a vacancy.

While Spratt’s campaign is built on a long and deep political career, Mulvaney bills himself as a citizen legislator, his short time in office an asset in a year with such an anti-incumbent venom coursing through an altered electorate.

What’s different now can be spelled out in one word, says state Rep. Ralph Norman, a Republican who lost to Spratt four years ago: timing.

“The difference in my race in ‘06 and now is that we have 20 percent unemployment, people are out of work and they’re mad,” Norman says. “That’s the big difference — and they’re voting.”

Norman exaggerates the unemployment rate; it’s actually 14 percent in York County. But with the anti-incumbent mood, it might not matter who Mulvaney is as much as which letter is on the ballot next to his name.

“If Osama bin Laden ran in this district as a Republican, he would get 38 to 40 percent of the vote in any election year,” says Wayne Wingate, Spratt’s communications director, as he walks alongside the congressman at the festival. “This is a very Republican district. So you’ve got that plus this tea party angst against any incumbent in the world right now.”

State Sen. Mick Mulvaney. Courtesy photo.

Thinking about his past opposition, the congressman says they were all better candidates than Mulvaney, but that isn’t what’s going to matter.

“He’s riding, as I like to say, the groundswell on the crest of a long wave,” Spratt says, one eye closed tight in the bright sun. “It’s not something he’s necessarily generating, but he’s mounting it and riding it — hopefully [for him] to victory — but we’ll see.”

A CSPAN camera had been following Spratt earlier. A reporter from the D.C.-based Roll Call newspaper stands nearby with a pen scratching a notepad. Spratt moves off to shake more hands. He can’t walk half a block without someone coming up to embrace him, thank him or offer him support.

But those people are here on the street, at Summerfest, not too far from Spratt’s actual home.

That buzzing in the electorate that Spratt should be worried about? It’s not happening here. It’s happening in the new fast-growing suburbs just below Charlotte where the bankers come home from work. It’s happening in retirement communities like Sun City, where the 55-and-older crowd is moving to retire near houses with an average yearly income of $120,000 or more. It’s happening where the people live with their backs to South Carolina and its politics, on the shores of large, glimmering man-made reflection ponds like Lake Wylie. It’s happening among the 25,000 or more new voters moving down from North Carolina into places like Lancaster County where the taxes are lower.

And it’s happening among people who maybe haven’t been paying that much attention to South Carolina elections — until now. It’s happening because of that thing called health care reform.

“People are going to vote on that because they’re upset about that,” says Rep. Norman. “I’ve been at the tea parties. People are coming out who have never been active before because they’re scared. And I think your elderly are very upset about health care.”

It’s the axe that Mulvaney and his people have been sharpening for a while; one that even the Spratt campaign knows will cut deep.

“The big themes going on in this race are the same things that are upsetting people across the country,” says Mulvaney spokesman Bryan Partridge, behind a pair of sunglasses near a tent for the local Republican Party. “Congress is spending too much money. We’re borrowing too much money. The majority of this district asked for Mr. Spratt not to vote for the health care bill.”

While Mulvaney is painting Spratt as a tool of the national Democratic agenda, unlike some others in his position Spratt isn’t campaigning away from the administration in Washington. He points to a trip this spring he took on Air Force One with Obama when the president came to visit a nearby plant that makes components for lithium batteries. Or a recent fundraiser Spratt held with Vice President Joe Biden [online copy corrected].

“I’m not running from the ticket,” Spratt says.

His campaign manager, Will Brown, acknowledges the political risks of that, pointing out that across the border in North Carolina, Democratic Congressman Larry Kissell isn’t having near the trouble Spratt is because Kissell voted ‘no’ on health care reform.

“If [Spratt] had not voted for the health care bill this election would be a cakewalk,” says his spokesman Wingate. “But he thought that it was the right thing to do. And he voted for it.”

Although Spratt will defend it, it’s not mostly what he talks about with voters. He says he mainly talks to them about local issues they can identify with, like projects in the district that have created jobs, local plants and industries and the congressman’s help snaring defense contracts.

“That’s what people are worried about: jobs,” Spratt says. “So I tell them what we’ve done.”

While Democrats have labeled him a political opportunist, Mulvaney has said that if Spratt hadn’t voted for the health care bill he wouldn’t even be running against him for his seat in Congress.

So far, Mulvaney’s largely been self-financing his bid and is currently under-funded by about three to one. On Aug. 20, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint campaigned with him in Lancaster County.

In a tongue-in-cheek gesture akin to offering someone a can of gasoline to help put out a fire, Mulvaney recently invited Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the 5th District to have a conversation about health care reform.

Spratt says he doesn’t need help from Washington politicians.

Instead, he says he’s going to run like he always has, though he admits that it’s difficult to take on wholesale politics with a retail effort.

“I’ll do what I know doing best,” he says, like getting out there and talking to people, trying to clear up misunderstandings and just being who he is.

It’s a different strategy than someone like, say, John McCain, who went through such a shape shift in his own recent re-election campaign for the U.S. Senate that he’s become a caricature of the chameleon politician, his policy positions tied to polling and a finger waving in the wind.

“I’ve been in this office for 28 years,” Spratt says. “I’ve never assumed some sort of persona to get elected that I denounced or ignored when I was finally elected. That’s worked. If you can’t tell them you’re doing something they want you to do, if you at least be straight and be frank with them, that’s the next best thing.”


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