The Confederate Flag and the South Carolina primary

The polls have now closed in SC and after being too close to call between McCain and Huckabee, the AP has called it for John McCain. I am making this post to help people not from South Carolina understand the flag issue in that state from someone who was involved in politics for a few years when the flag fight was going on. I intentionally waited to post this after the polls closed so I wouldn’t be accused of trying to impact the race in even an insignificant manner. I think posts like this are just helpful for analysis after the fact.

Since an item is in the news that I have a lot of information on related to today’s Republican Presidential Primary, I’m going off on a tangent again with a non-Baltimore post. My personal background as it relates to South Carolina politics is at the bottom of this
post. I will tie it in to Baltimore in a sense. At last year’s Lee-Jackson Birthday Ceremony downtown, I had a gentleman tell me that early on in 1860-61 that Southern sympathizers in Baltimore wore Palmetto tree pins and carried Palmetto tree flags.

This week’s news from South Carolina has included the usual heavy dose of politics around the Confederate flag with Huckabee coming out for a states’ rights position on the flag - a safe one that most candidates usually take.I’d heard a little bit about what was going on via the mainstream news reports and maybe a little bit of blog reading, although I haven’t gotten to do as much of that lately as I used to. The first place I read much about it in the blogosphere was at Outside the Beltway, where James Joyner has an excellent post on the issue based on a New York Times article. Before I go on, one brief correction to the NYT article: David Beasley did not remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome. It was removed by legislative action that was then signed into law by Gov. Jim Hodges in 2000. Another blog post at TPM Election Central by Greg Sargent discusses the issue.

Background of the Confederate flag & S.C. politics since 1962

I’ll discuss this week’s events in a moment, but I first want to provide some background into the Confederate flag’s role in South Carolina politics for the past 46 or so years. In 1962, the Confederate flag was placed on the State House dome by legislative resolution apparently with the intent to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War (a.k.a. War Between the States, War for Southern Independence, War of Northern Aggression, etc.) It was then left on the dome long after the 1965 end of that commemoration and remained there until 2000. The actual flag placed there has been more accurately described as a Confederate naval jack as opposed to the Confederate Battle Flag. It may have been used as a battle flag by some Confederate armies in the west, but the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (where most S.C. Confederates served) was a square flag.

I don’t recall much controversy about the flag until the 1990s. It may have been my youth or my lack of involvement in politics before that point. I do think there was a bill introduced at Youth in Government’s Student Legislature when I was in High School (I finished H.S. in 1992) but I’m pretty sure it didn’t pass.

There was an attempt in the early to mid-90s (I want to say 1995) to get the flag down but it was unsuccessful. I think some sort of resolution was passed supporting the flag in a late-night session of the state senate (some sort of announcement was made about it at Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies on the Statehouse grounds the year it happened.) I may be mistaken on these events or when they happened, so please correct me if your memory is better. I want to say this was directly related to a series of legal challenges that eventually made their way to the state Supreme Court about the legal standing for the flag to remain flying on the dome and the legislation passed was an attempt to clarify things, but I may be mistaken.

In 1994, the state primary elections were later than usual because of redistricting and reapportionment issues. The Republican Party put 3 or 4 advisory referenda on their ballot that related to issues that people were interested in that year as an attempt to help turnout. One of these was whether Confederate flag should remain over the Statehouse. I don’t remember any of the other issues other than one was property-tax related. My candidate for the State House had no primary that year but he took the position that he would do whatever the voters in his district wanted, based on that referendum in the primary. In the general election that year when we were campaigning door to door we usually stayed strictly at houses on our “walk-list” that were reliable Republican voters but we decided to make one exception: we made cold calls at houses with a Confederate flag flying to make sure they knew my candidate’s position.

The next major news related to the Confederate saga occurred just after Bob Dole was unsuccessful in his bid to defeat Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1996. During the run-up to the primary campaign the possibility of former S.C. Governor Carroll Campbell being a running mate was mentioned, especially as it related to the eventual nominee Bob Dole. Most of this seemed to be just an attempt to gain support in South Carolina, but it was later revealed that the Confederate flag issue had factored into why Campbell might not have been picked (as an aside, an issue with an independent candidate making an issue of Greenville Mayor Max Heller’s Judaism the year he ran against Campbell was also an issue - many had accused Lee Atwater of being behind the independent.) Members of Campbell’s family are supporting Mike Huckabee this year - in fact Mike Campbell had the Huckabees with him when he voted this morning in Columbia.

Just after the November election in 1996, Governor David Beasley proposed taking the Confederate flag down. He said at the time it was because of a message from God, but it appeared to many he was just paving the way for higher political aspirations. There were even some reports that his buddy Ralph Reed at the Christian Coalition was behind the move. I missed most of the events of 1997 while I was in Missouri and Arizona at Basic Training and AIT.

I was back for all of the events of ‘98 that led up to the election but I’m going to condense things a bit because of time issues. Basically, Beasley tried to reinforce his base by pushing for a ban on video poker. This caused a great deal of video poker industry money to be in play that year. Originally, Sheriff James Metts of Lexington County was running as a Republican against Beasley. There were also people from the Taxpayers Party’ trying to woo him to run as their candidate as well. I was tasked to go to one of their party meetings in Newberry when Metts was discussed and to record it for the Beasley campaign (I did the same thing later at a video poker manufacturer’s fundraiser for Hodges at the Greenville Hilton - I even won a door prize there.) Metts later dropped out at the Republican convention and endorsed Beasley. A group called the Palmetto League was formed and they met with Hodges to discuss the election. Hodges promised them that he wouldn’t initiate any action to take the flag down. The Palmetto League was facilitated by Democratic consultant Frank Knapp who arranged a meeting that included Ron Wilson, Jerry Creech and other pro-flag people. Creech was from the Council of Conservative Citizens. Wilson was later Commander-in-Chief of the SCV nationally and he is a county councilman in Anderson now after an unsuccesful legislative campaign. I did a lot of the investigative reporting that proved the Knapp connections to the Palmetto League back then. All the poker money plus a disaffected base because of the flag issue combined to hand Beasley a loss that year. Beasley collected a Profile in Courage award from the JFK library for his stance on the flag later.

Much has been written about the tactics in the 2000 primary in South Carolina. I won’t add too much to that other than one fact that was previously only known by a few people. Prior to the 2000 primary, a Republican consultant I knew well asked me to construct an anti-McCain website in exchange for cash. The site focused on McCain’s positions on gays, the Confederate flag, and other issues including some fringe material from veterans groups who were anti-McCain as well as stories from the Phoenix New Times detailing McCain’s business dealings. The Keating 5 issue was also mentioned. The major focus of it was McCain’s stance on the Confederate flag and his support of the Log Cabin Republicans. The consultant who paid me was also working a Congressional race in Texas that year, which made me think the money was coming from some pro-Bush sources out there. However, when the PhoneyFred scandal broke this past year and implicated consultant Warren Tompkins, it made me wonder. The consultant who paid me had been a Beasley administration staffer as well as a Beasley campaign staffer in both ‘94 when Tompkins was a Beasley consultant. The PhoneyFred story sounded very familiar to me, I just was able to cover my tracks on the domain registration and webhosting better than the Tompkins people. 2000 also saw the pro-flag voters go after people they considered traitors like then-Sen. Andre Bauer.

The flag came down that year after Republicans in both houses went for a compromise that would put it on Statehouse grounds at the Confederate Soldier’s monument. The “Magnificent Seven” of Senators who voted to keep the flag up included current Congressman Joe Wilson (who I served with in the 218th Infantry Brigade of the National Guard.) The campaign against people like Bauer and the other people who had changed their position on the flag in the legislature was called No Votes for Turncoats.

2008 primary

David Beasley has campaigned for Mike Huckabee in South Carolina this year, as well as flag “turncoat” Andre Bauer. Carroll Campbell’s family also supports Huckabee. Some of the fringe flag supporters in the pro-secession League of the South have protested outside several candidate rallies and taken credit for Huckabee’s eventual position. Tim Manning is supporting Ron Paul apparently while calling Huckabee’s position a fraud. Click here for video of Huckabee’s position.

The ads mentioned in the TPM and Outside the Beltway posts I mentioned at the very top of this post were run by a 527 called Americans for the Preservation of American Culture. This group reportedly has ties to the SCV and even uses the SCV Charge in some of its literature while denying that indicates any connections. The ads mainly attack McCain and Romney and praise Huckabee.

Here are the ads (they’re also here):

Mike Crane, someone whose name is recognizable to most people who have been involved in the SCV, is listed as an APAC board member. Former SCV Commander in Chief Ron Wilson has been quoted in the media on behalf of APAC. The link here has a lot of information on Wilson and his past ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens. There has been a schism nationally in the SCV for the past few years that split the non-profit organization into factions that want to be more political and factions who don’t. One of the groups opposing Wilson and his allies is Save the SCV.

Former SC SCV commander and state Senator Danny Verdin (a friend of mine) has also endorsed Huckabee along with many other in the pro-Confederate flag community in South Carolina.

Ralph Reed has been on TV during the primaries trashing John McCain this cycle.

So let’s put some things together now. We have Ron Wilson, who has run for office as a Republican on more than one occasion, supporting Mike Huckabee and bashing John McCain. This is the same Ron Wilson who was so adamantly opposed to David Beasley that he joined forces with the Democrats in 1998 to get him defeated. This year he’s supporting the same candidate for President as David Beasley. David Beasley was the darling of the Christian Coalition and the larger Christian right when he got elected and was in office and has been compared to a martyr since then by some in that movement. Ralph Reed, who directed the Christian Coalition and ran the campaign of Mike Fair (another Huckabee supporter) for Congress in SC a few years, is trashing John McCain on national TV.

Politics make strange bedfellows but I can’t think of a scenario where some of the pro-Confederate flag supporters would put themselves anywhere so close to David Beasley. All of the connections detailed in the previous paragraph at the very least raise some questions about circumstantial connections and how things appear.

I personally supported keeping the Confederate flag atop the Statehouse dome, but I understand why some people were offended by it. I don’t think it ever will go up again on the dome but I don’t favor removing it from the Statehouse grounds. The oft-mentioned NAACP boycott has had little significant impact on the South Carolina economy - especially after that group moved the goalposts after the original compromise in place now was passed.

James Joyner makes some good points however:

Huckabee and the commercial are right on three points:
* The average guy with a Confederate battle flag on his pickup truck in indeed saying nothing more sinister than “I’m proud to be a Southerner.”
* For most of these guys, it’s about respect for heritage and values rather than race.
* This issue is none of the federal government’s business.

McCain’s right, though, that South Carolina did the right thing in deciding to stop flying the flag over the state capitol. The state has a large black population which, for good reason, sees it as a symbol of slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and other ugly parts of our past.

Not all that long ago, I agreed with Huckabee on the issue, finding the “heritage” argument dispositive. Hardy Jackson, my Southern History professor — and a proud Southerner — convinced me to change my mind with an elementary point: A core element of Southern culture (or, at least, its ideal) is civility. If flying the flag is deeply hurtful to a third of your population, it’s just downright rude to keep doing it. Let alone over your state capital.

So, Huckabee’s right that it’s not within the president’s power to tell South Carolina what to put on its flag. But McCain’s right that it’s a would-be president’s duty to speak out on issues that divide the country. There are all manner of things that are outside the scope of the president’s job where he can nonetheless lead by use of the bully pulpit.

Personal Background

I lived in South Carolina for most of my life, with trips away for extended military training (I served as an intelligence analyst in the Army National Guard for 6 years) and a few semesters at Georgetown. I’ll start off with some personal background information. I was involved in South Carolina Republican politics from the early ’90s when I was an officer in Teenage Republicans through my time in College Republicans at Presbyterian College and later party activism and consulting for candidates. I was one of the Vice Chairmen of the Laurens County Republican Party (Fred Thompson was there the other day) for a couple of years in the mid-’90s.

I worked off and on in talk radio, including stints as a reporter. Among other things, I covered the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego for a local talk radio station owned by a friend of mine in the Upstate. I covered the 1998 general election cycle as a reporter for a syndicated statewide talk radio show based in Columbia. I also published a political/news website from 1998-2002. My personal blog, Backcountry Conservative, covered SC and national issues from 2002-2006.

I spent the ‘92 elections in D.C. while at Georgetown, volunteering for the Bush campaign. I consulted for Republican candidates for office starting in 1994. I was a press secretary for a congressional candidate who lost to Lindsey Graham in the primary that year and ran the campaign of a State House candidate in the general election that year. I also was paid as a research assistant for the consultant who flew in from D.C. to do the opposition research on Lt. Gov. Nick Theodore on behalf of the state GOP and the campaign of David Beasley. I worked for the re-election campaign of Mayor Bill Workman in Greenville in 1995, mainly doing oppo research. I left his campaign to help out with a special election campaign for Chris Sullivan, who was running for the state senate. Sullivan is presently the national commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV.) I helped out some state and local candidates in 1996, including doing one of the first websites for a candidate in S.C. for a state senate race in Anderson. I also helped out, in a limited manner, my cousin who was running for Sheriff that year.

In 1998, I was running a website and working as a radio reporter, but I did manage to do some opposition research on State House candidates for the oppo consultant who was hired by the House GOP Caucus. This same consultant was doing work for Amato in New York against Hillary Clinton and for Lauch Faircloth in NC against John Edwards. He had me go to Seneca and Walhalla in South Carolina to do research on Edwards. Specifically, I was asked to find proof of Edwards’ birth in South Carolina, since at this time he was campaigning on his bonafides as a native North Carolinian. As my duties as a radio reporter that year, I was in the press availability at an event headlined by then-Governor George W. Bush as he campaigned for the re-election of Gov. David Beasley. I also was at the surreal event that featured Beasley, his wife and one of his staffers Ginny Wolfe, along with her husband George Wolfe (who worked to reestablish the banking system in Iraq for the Bush administration.) This press conference was in response to allegations that had boiled over after a rumor initially appearing in a progressive monthly that the Governor and Mrs. Wolfe were having an extramarital affair. I also built the website for Lt. Governor Bob Peeler’s campaign that year.

I worked in state government for two agencies (the Adjutant General’s Office and the Attorney General’s office - for Stan Spears and Charlie Condon) from late 1998 through 2001 and then as a federal civilian for the National Guard after that. In 1999, I accompanied the Adjutant General to Rock Hill for an event when he endorsed the presidential campaign of George W. Bush (he endorsed McCain this time.) I also contributed money to the campaign of Danny Verdin for State Senate during that cycle. Danny won in 2000 against an incumbent. I stil consider Danny to be a good friend of mine. He previously served as the South Carolina Division Commander of the SCV and he has endorsed Mike Huckabee this year. In that cycle, I was also paid by a Republican consultant in SC to design and build an anti-McCain website that was hosted at AnybodyButMcCain.com (as mentioned previously.)

I was a member of the SCV from 1995 to around 2000 or so when I let my membership lapse due to time constraints. For about a year or to, I also was a reenactor in the Palmetto Light Artillery, which reenacted both Confederate and Union impressions. I was also the webmaster for the South Carolina Division of the SCV for a short period of time.

This year, I’m supporting Fred Thompson for President by voting for him in the Feb. 12 primary here in Maryland, assuming he’s still in it by then. I don’t have as many problems with the campaign of McCain as I used to and wouldn’t have much of a problem supporting him, since I primarily vote (even pre 9/11) based on national security issues. I am a registered Republican in the state of Maryland because I want to actually have a chance at voting in a primary.

I’ve tried to include any information that might reveal any of my biases in the post above in the interests of full disclosure.

References
These include posts on this subject as well as posts on the results in South Carolina.

Outside the Beltway*2
Stop the ACLU
Michelle Malkin
Hot Air
Right Wing News - RWN
Instapundit
FITSNews*2
The Palmetto Scoop
Buzz Blog
RedState
TPM*2
Earl Capps
Brad Warthen*2*3
SC6

Photo at top left by Jason Trommetter.