The political world has been scratching its head since the bizarre June 8 primary election in South Carolina. Voters of that state gave the Democrat nomination to a barely known candidate who faces serious legal problems. They rejected the candidacy of a much better-known former state lawmaker.
The newly picked nominee is Alvin Greene. He is an unemployed 32-year-old who acknowledges he was involuntarily discharged from the Army. In addition, he was arrested back in November and faces a felony obscenity charge. A college coed says he showed her a pornographic website and discussed going back to her room. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.
News accounts say Mr. Greene seems to have done almost no campaigning, nor to have set up a campaign website — practically a necessity for any candidate seeking high office nowadays. And yet he stunned South Carolina by handily defeating Vic Rawl, who had been heavily favored.
Lots of conspiracy theories are now floating about, with Democrat U.S. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina suggesting that somehow the GOP is responsible for Mr. Greene’s victory in the Democrat primary. He said the nominee may be a “Republican plant,” The New York Times reported.
But with hardly anyone having known anything about Mr. Greene prior to the primary, his victory over an apparently much stronger opponent raises big questions not only about him but about the voting public. Would even modestly informed voters have selected such an individual as their party’s nominee for a seat in the United States Senate?
Alas, we cannot simply point fingers at South Carolina. While Mr. Greene’s case is extreme, American voters have made a number of astonishingly unwise election picks for decades — at the federal, state and local levels.
We may not like what those politicians have done once they got in office, but doesn’t it say something disturbing about us voters that we put them there?