Is Lindsey Graham Actually in Trouble in South Carolina?
Michael Quattlebaum was just 10 years old when he attended a high-dollar Republican fundraising dinner in South Carolina’s state Capitol. His father was active in his local chapter of the GOP and eager to pass on the tradition. They were a Southern Baptist family from Anderson County, where Donald Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote, including Quattlebaum’s. “It’s pretty deeply ingrained in my lifeblood,” Quattlebaum said of his conservatism. He’s now married with five children, including a son in the National Guard who just returned from Afghanistan.
But George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the protests that followed pushed Quattlebaum to examine a conflict between his political and moral beliefs. “I’ve never considered myself a racist, but I have been complicit in it because of my silence,” he said. He wants the elected officials that represent him “to be angry about this situation,” but the politicians he has voted for—like Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham—are not. “It makes me embarrassed to be a Republican.”
Snip
On his desk, Jaime Harrison keeps a quote from Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, the former South Carolina governor and senator who, in 1876, led a white paramilitary gang that murdered six innocent African Americans in what was known as the Hamburg Massacre. “We have done our level best,” Tillman said of the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Black voters. “We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed.”
Snip
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/11/jaime-harrison-lindsey-graham-south-carolina-391886
= new reply since forum marked as read
