Supporters of free trade won a resounding victory in South Carolina yesterday, when Congressman Jim DeMint trounced former governor and reinvented Buchananite David Beasley in the GOP U.S. Senate runoff. But the fight for trade isn’t over.
DeMint, who beat Beasley 59-41 percent, will now face state Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum in November as South Carolinians replace Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings. Tenenbaum had already picked up Beasley’s anti-free-trade mantle before the polls closed yesterday, standing outside an Upstate textile plant and saying “I personally don’t think the government should be in the business of putting people out of work. This is what some of our free-trade agreements have done.”
Beasley’s defeat was a crippling political blow to a politician once seen as a potential national candidate. Elected to the South Carolina state legislature before he was old enough to legally be sworn into office, Beasley’s youth, good looks, and popularity among evangelicals once made him a formidable political force.
However, his career-long political opportunism–he switched parties to become a Republican just months before entering the governor’s race–undermined his position on issues like trade. Having governed as a free-trade Republican until 1998, some viewed his recent political conversion as a political ploy to gain votes, and money, from the textile industry upstate.
It didn’t work.
DeMint will face a more consistent and coherent opponent in Tenenbaum, currently South Carolina’s most popular Democrat. In 2002, when Republicans Mark Sanford and Lindsey Graham were swept into the governor’s mansion and U.S. Senate (respectively), Inez Tenenbaum received more votes than any other statewide candidate, Republican or Democrat. She’s energetic, smart and–thanks to her husband Sam’s success in the steel business–well financed.
Tenenbaum is also a moderate who supports the war in Iraq, the death penalty, and a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. And though pro-choice, she does oppose partial-birth abortion. These political stances, and the relatively low profile of Jim DeMint, have caused some reporters covering the DeMint-Tenenbaum race to declare it a close call. It won’t be.
David Beasley was Tenenbaum’s only hope of winning a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina this year, and it was a forlorn hope at that. Beasley, who lost 25 percent of the Republican vote in his 1998 re-election defeat, was the only candidate who endangered the Republican coalition. There was a possibility that the moderate, “country-club” Republicans who rejected him before might have turned to Tenenbaum this year.
Instead, Jim DeMint is a solid Republican with a clean slate. Solidly conservative on social and fiscal issues, DeMint keeps all the Republicans on board, which should be enough right there to win the Senate race. However, even if Tenenbaum puts together a strategy that could beat Jim DeMint, there is one Republican she cannot hope to beat in South Carolina this year: George W. Bush.
All signs point the W. way in the Palmetto state. The way I read it, the people of South Carolina are going to overwhelmingly vote to re-elect Bush in November, in part to show their support for the war and, especially, the troops. Those same voters are never going to turn around and send a Democrat to Washington to oppose Bush, not even one who purportedly supports the war. If South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate this year, it would be portrayed by the national media as a slam against Bush. South Carolinians know that, and they will not let it happen.
DeMint and the Republicans know this: “We get to run with Bush. She gets to run with Kerry,” says S.C. Republican-party chairman Katon Dawson. “I’ll take those odds in South Carolina any day.”
Just to be safe, however, DeMint plans to out-spend Tenenbaum by a 2-1 margin. If that happens, the GOP can put this one in the bank.
–Radio-talk host Michael Graham is an NRO contributor.