Vetting candidates

[SuperScout]

A day after an unemployed veteran charged with a felony shocked South Carolina's Democratic establishment by winning the U.S. Senate primary, party officials were still scratching their heads: What happened?
Alvin Greene, 32, didn't raise any money. He didn't have a website. And his opponent was a relatively better-known former legislator, Vic Rawl, who was already preparing for the general election.
Greene was considered such a long shot that his opponent and media didn't even bother to check his background. If they had, they would have discovered he faces a felony obscenity charge after an alleged encounter with a college student last fall.

Well, boys and girls, it look like the ol' Democrat Party screwed up again, failing to properly vet a thug who ended up not only on the ballot, but winnning his race! Had they looked at his past, they would have realized that (1) he is an embarrassment to the party (unless they want to really back him, to their peril!) (2) he is unqualified to serve, and (3) if by some miracle, he does get elected, the US Senate has the authority not to seat him. Maybe the DNC shold have done a better job of vetting The Bastard, to really see where he was from, to really check his SS number, so that its issuance place matches with The Bastard's past history. (Oh, BTW, in case you missed it, The Bastard has a SS number issured to citizens of Connecticutt, a state The Bastard has never been a resident of.) And they might have examined his aleged time spent at Occidental College in Kauliphonia, to see why he qualified for a Fulbright Scholarship, which are given to foreign students. Or what passport The Bastard used to go to some countries when US citizens were prohibited from going there.

Ah yes, the Democrat party - party of the people. Um hmmm.

[darrels joy]

Shep Smith grills Democratic mystery nominee facing obscenity charge

YouTube- Alvin Greene

[darrels joy]

...

"I check my e-mail, like, it varies, maybe -- I'm more, I mean -- two or three times a week," he says. "I prefer the telephone. I'm a little old-fashioned. I prefer the telephone. That's the easiest."

Greene, a solidly built 32-year-old, sighs heavily as he speaks, pausing often during long, meandering monologues. He taps his hand against the table, alternating between staring at the floor and running a hand across his face. He sits on a folding metal chair at a picnic table set on the linoleum floor of his father's wood-paneled living room. Above him, a ceiling fan with a bare bulb stands motionless. His father -- who says he's a dialysis patient and is still recovering from open-heart surgery four years ago -- moans in pain and occasionally interrupts Greene to say he's veered off the subject.

Greene's life story is as vague as his campaign. He says he was born in Florence, S.C., went to high school in Manning (a town of 4,000 near his father's home) and graduated from the University of South Carolina in political science. He says he served in the military -- first in the Air Force and then in the Army -- from his college graduation in 2000 until nine months ago. "I was honorably discharged from the Army, but it was involuntary," he says. "Things weren't working. Same thing happened in the Air Force. . . . It's a long story in both services."
...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

[SuperScout]

I guess this is the best Da Dims could come up with. Oh well.

[darrels joy]

Experts review S.C. Senate ballots By: David Catanese June 11, 2010 02:06 PM EDT

The campaign of defeated Democratic Senate candidate Vic Rawl has assembled a team of national academic experts to review Tuesday’s perplexing South Carolina primary results that propelled a virtually unknown, underfunded and unemployed candidate to the party’s nomination over a veteran officeholder and public official. Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig tells POLITICO three different teams of experts in election data analysis are combing through the results in the state’s 46 counties and already turning up some eye-opening trend lines. The review is in response to the shocking victory by 32-year-old Alvin Greene, who, despite never giving a campaign speech or running any television or radio ads, managed to handily defeat Rawl 59 percent to 41 percent. The state party chairwoman has already asked Greene to step aside, and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) has speculated that he might be a Republican plant. Greene has pledged to remain in the race and said he has “always been a Democrat.” While Ludwig cautioned that the campaign is not jumping to any conclusions, he said the experts, who volunteered their services, have already uncovered some “curious” findings in the election data. One potential red flag: A significant difference between the results of absentee and election day ballots. According to Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots. “The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.” In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points. In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count. “In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said. Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach. “This may add up to nothing. This all could be a clerical error. We don’t know, but [we] thought it was worth looking into,” said Ludwig, who added that the experts doing the unpaid research asked that their names not be revealed until they disclose their conclusions. Ludwig said the experts could be prepared to offer their findings by late Friday but cautioned that it’s likely not to be definitive. “These are not detectives, they look at huge amounts of election data that say this doesn’t look like it should, or it does,” he said. Asked what else could explain Greene’s unlikely rise, Ludwig appeared at a loss. He said the campaign sent 300,000 e-mails, conducted a quarter million robocalls and logged nearly 17,000 miles to Democratic events around the state. “I was tracking the guy everywhere and there was nothing to track. Am I kicking myself in the ass? Sure. I’m just not sure what we would’ve done different,” he said.

© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38433.html

[SuperScout]

A Republican plant? Why would the GOP sink $10k into a campaign that absolutely nobody thought could be won by the nobody, when that money would be better invested in the general election? Once again, the tinfoil helmet crowd is running amok.