NYT: South Carolina Is an Important Primary............
Uhh, really Sherlock?? Well., if you want to read it, here is the NY Times article...........
NY Times
By Michael Luo
HILTON HEAD, S.C. - Tony Piscatella has been busy shopping for a Republican
presidential candidate to support. On Tuesday, he stopped in to hear Mitt Romney at a town hall meeting in Summerville. The next morning, he drove to nearby Mount Pleasant to hear Fred D. Thompson at a diner. Afterward, he said he would probably give Mr. Thompson the edge but wanted to hear more.
“He’s a Southerner,” said Mr. Piscatella, who lives in Summerville. “He’s got our traditional values at heart.”
With his Southern roots and drawl, Mr. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, would seem to be the man to beat in South Carolina’s
Republican Primary on Jan. 19; he leads in most polls, and many political observers see his candidacy either rising or falling on how he does in the state. But Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, has shown surprising strength in the state, running first or second in many surveys. Mr. Romney began blanketing the state with television commercials last month. And Senator John McCain of Arizona is now largely focused on New Hampshire and this state to propel his campaign.
In the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, South Carolina, more than perhaps any other early voting state, is shaping up as a pivotal battleground where each of these four candidates believes he has a solid shot of winning. Since 1980, each victor in South Carolina has gone on to become the Republican nominee.
It is Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, who has been the most aggressive in the state as of late, seeking to apply the same formula he used in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he trailed early on but built leads in large part through a flood of early advertising.
Mr. Romney’s challenges would appear to be more daunting in South Carolina, where he has lagged in the polls. Many in the state, which has a large concentration of white evangelical Republican voters, consider his Mormon faith to be heretical.
$1 million in commercialsBut Mr. Romney has spent over $1 million on television commercials in South Carolina, the vast majority in the last few weeks; his rivals have yet to run any. And Mr. Romney has devoted more than $140,000 to his direct mail operation in the state, far more than anyone else, and more than $200,000 on in-state consultants, with a heavy emphasis on courting evangelicals.
His campaign recently unveiled a series of endorsements from Christian conservatives, including Bob Jones III, chancellor of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, and Robert R. Taylor, the dean of the university’s school of arts and sciences.
But Mr. Romney’s campaign suffered a setback when the Rev. Donald J. Wilton, pastor of a Spartanburg church and immediate past president of the state’s Southern Baptist convention, suddenly withdrew his endorsement this week, calling it a “personal error.”
Initially, Mr. McCain, who has been to the state 15 times since January, had been the favorite here, locking up endorsements from some 40 state legislators and building up a formidable field operation. Then the campaign ran into financial problems over the summer, and he had to lay off much of his staff. But Mr. McCain’s top two political consultants agreed to work without pay, and, last month, the campaign began hiring again. Staffing levels have largely recovered; still, the campaign continues to work to convince voters that Mr. McCain remains viable.
In 2000, Mr. McCain garnered 42 percent of the vote in the South Carolina Republican primary largely by doing well in the coastal region, which tends to be less socially conservative and more focused on fiscal issues. But he was hurt badly, especially in the upstate region, by opposition from those who considered themselves members of the religious right.
This time is different, said Richard Quinn, one of Mr. McCain’s political consultants. Mr. McCain has sought to smooth over relations with evangelical leaders and has highlighted a consistent voting record against abortion, which contrasts him with some of his rivals. But many Christian conservatives still regard him as a maverick.
Largely unknownMr. Romney, unlike Mr. McCain, remains largely unknown to many in South Carolina. He began cultivating party leaders and activists in 2006 and has continued to lavish attention on them, sending representatives to push his cause at meetings, making sure to support county Republican Party organizations and competing vigorously in straw polls across the state.
“If I ever ran for the president of the United States, I’d want to do it like
Mitt Romney,” said Samuel Harms, chairman of the Republican Party in Greenville County, a conservative stronghold that Mr. Romney first visited early last year. “It’s my impression that he’s outworking everybody else.”
Mr. Romney’s campaign has already named precinct captains in the top 300 of the 1,500 voting precincts in the state, which cover areas to include much of the vote. And his campaign has conducted extensive phone bank operations for months.
Mr. Giuliani’s state chairman, Barry Wynn, said that the Giuliani organization in South Carolina has ramped up as well, pointing out that it now has three offices there. “I would argue as of today that we’ve caught up,” Mr. Wynn said.
Giuliani — perhaps because of his national reputation in responding to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — has been able to do well so far without spending much money, although he has run three different radio advertisements and visited the state a dozen times. Many had doubted Mr. Giuliani’s prospects here because of his liberal views on social issues.
But his campaign believes that demographics have changed to his advantage in some parts of the state and that he can compete even among evangelicals upstate because they value his strong stance on terrorism.
Mr. Giuliani’s campaign focused more attention on South Carolina early on than on Iowa and New Hampshire. His advisers see the state as a potentially decisive domino, where a victory, along with one in Florida on Jan. 29, could give him an insurmountable advantage heading into the nation’s super primary on Feb. 5.
Many consider the South Carolina primary as Mr. Thompson’s to lose. But he has been scrambling to make up for his late start. His campaign moved into its headquarters in Columbia only recently; he has six paid staff members, about half of what his rivals have. The campaign is being run by Dean Rice, a longtime aide of Mr. Thompson’s from Tennessee.
Mr. Thompson, who was visiting the state this week for just the second time since he declared his candidacy in early September, drew larger crowds than Mr. Romney but covered much less ground, stopping in only Mount Pleasant and Bluffton near the coast, whereas Mr. Romney dashed across the state from Greenville to Charleston.
Republican activists warned that Mr. Thompson cannot take the state for granted.
“For Fred Thompson, South Carolina is a must-win state,” said Mr. Harms, the party leader in Greenville County. “So whatever it takes for him to win the state, he’s got to do.”
