Why I Can't Laugh at Alvin Greene

I'm a partisan Republican with a sadistic streak - oh, yes, I will happily admit it - and Alvin Greene is an easy target, yes?  His campaign site takes donations only via PayPal.  He's so far behind in the polls that the margin is perilously close to being an outright majority.  His media strategy involves making bunny ears.  So. Free hits, right?

No.

I don't want Alvin Greene to be the next Senator from South Carolina: Jim Demint suits me just fine, thanks. There's also that weird court case that Greene's going through, which sounds at best disturbing. And the Democrat, by all accounts, has opinions that diverge radically from my own on a wide range of issues. But where he and I share an opinion is in the belief that there are rules to the game of politics. They're complex rules, and sometimes they're not fair rules, but they're there, and those rules should not simply be ignored when one doesn't like the results.

And by those rules Alvin Greene is not being well-treated by his party. Like it or not, he spent the ten grand or so needed to get into the primary. Like it or not, the South Carolina Democratic party did not properly run a good primary campaign for its anointed candidate. Like it or not, Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary. He followed all the rules--rules that the Democrats themselves set up, but apparently don't actually believe in--and he should reap what marginal rewards accrue to an official Senatorial candidate who in two weeks is going to get crushed at the polls. But he has not. That might be what sticks in my craw the most about this one. I have a terrible fear that Alvin Greene may think he has some sort of future ahead of him because of his primary "win."  He won't, of course. When this is over, he'll discover very quickly that the only thing that the Democrats want him to do is go back to his father's house, close the door behind him--and never, ever come out again. 

He'll be the wrong kind of former candidate, you see. From the national Democrats' point of view he'll be the guy who kept them from trying too hard to kick Kendrick Meek out of the Florida Senatorial race: the DSCC's minority recruitment this cycle was awful (so was their general recruitment, but that's another story), and Meek being 'persuaded' to drop out in favor of Charlie Crist would have looked even more horrible once it meant that Alvin Greene would be the only African-American Democrat running for the Senate. So Meek got to stay, thus denying the Democrats a pickup chance in Florida . . . and if you don't think that the party won't be as petty as they can be to an inconvenience like Greene, then you haven't been paying attention to recent political history.

And that's why I can't laugh at Alvin Greene. The poor sucker actually bought into the narrative of the Democratic party, and thought that they'd welcome an actual, no-fooling, total outsider who somehow managed to prevail against the system and win the nomination.  There's something almost . . . tragic about that.  Or maybe I just don't like the Other Side being too obvious in their disdain for America's sacred civic myths, given that said myths are the major reason we don't settle close elections with automatic weapons fire.  Either way... either way, it just stirs me to--well, pity.

Which is a heck of a thing.