Strom Thurmond is a 100 year old bigot who based his campaigns on bigotry when he could and took up other ultra right banners when he couldn’t. His political opposite, Ted Kennedy, is at best a spoiled brat who manipulated evidence in a criminal investigation and a good argument could be made that he’s a murderer (and that he was expelled from Harvard for cheating is irrefragable).
As I’m not from South Carolina or Massachusetts and haven’t researched their careers in depth, I’m curious: why do these two men keep getting elected (usually without serious competition)? How do you survive pasts such as they have and stay in politics, while Trent Lott might be crucified by one stupid comment, Clinton gets impeached for lying about a marital indiscretion, and Gingrich is ridden from DC on a rail? What in their political genes makes them the surviving fittest?
Also, since most of the cool things in the Senate are based on seniority, it was in South Carolina’s interest, for example, to keep voting in Thurmond, as he has the most seniority even if he is no longer very effective. After all, his staffers can always just tell him what to say.
As an aside: Is anyone else creeped out by the way that man looks?
In Strom Thurmand’s (minor) defense, his segregationist views mellowed out over the years. I don’t think he’s still running on a platform of keepin’ them uppity colored folk in their place, or anything. And Ted Kennedy may be a slimy weasel, but he shares the same ideology as his voting base. And while we’re questioning the sanity of the electorate, how about Trafficant? Even after he was convicted, he still somehow managed to garner quite a few votes.
You could say Ted is in because he is a Kennedy. When you put that in perspective, it is pretty hard to lose (though Kathleen pulled it off earlier this year).
Maybe it has something to do with people doing something over and over again because that’s how it’s always been done.
Yesterday I was pondering the “how in the hell did Strom keep returning to office term after term” question myself. Now I figure it’s because he was a popular man at one time and nothing catastrophic happened to tear down that popularity. Generations of voters have perpetuated the status quo probably because they saw no reason to change and because his name is recognizable. Since the change in race perception didn’t happen over night for most people, it’s probably not likely that one day S. Carolinians en masse stopped to wonder in self-disgust how they could elect a man who once advocated Jim Crow. Maybe people got so used to seeing his name on the ballot that they didn’t really think about what his platform had been in previous years.
Ted Kennedy has passed more legislation than any other senator in the Senate, and probably more than most combined, so your assertion that he is worthless and hasn’t done anything doesn’t square with the facts. He is probably the most effective senator in history. http://uspolitics.about.com/library/weekly/aa030900a.htm
But Strom is KING of constituent services. It seems like everybody here in South Carolina has a story about Strom, and most of them are the “when I was up a creek and asked for help, he made it happen” kind. He’s very present in state culture in a lot of ways - when my father’s company had (still does, I guess) a box at the Clemson home games, he’d drop by and drink up some of the liquor, press the flesh. He shopped at the PX here at Fort Jackson. He’s very much the old-style good ol’ boy politician, which does in fact work.
Plus, definate force of habit. And his seniority kept our bases from being closed, and people always vote for the guy who will keep their jobs.
I can’t even name anybody who ran against him until maybe the last election, because it just didn’t matter.
Please indicate where I said he is worthless; I just said that he’s inethical and probably a murderer.
My curiosity is more how he gets elected after Chappaquiddick, alcoholism, infidelities, divorce, etc., when far lesser scandals that don’t involve death and cover-up have derailed the careers of other politicians. I chose Thurmond and Kennedy because they’re two polar opposites (conservative: liberal, southern: northern, ineffective:effective, family connections: self made, etc.) so it proves it’s not just family connections or money.
NPR had a segment about Strom Thurmand. They said that he had a really strong setup for people from his state to press their views and make them feel that they had someone in congress that was there for them.
This is a major reason he probably stayed in the Senate. There is no major legislation that is passed that does not pass with out divisiveness. So there nothing that could be pointed to for purposes of rallying the opposition.
As ElJeffe points out his stance on Jimcrow mellowed probably a lot like the stance of South Carolina’s in general has mellowed.
I think that part of the expansion of the country under Clinton was due to the fact that Congress was the oppisition and he and congress had to hack out some middle of the road direction for the country. So I think that no Major legislation if a good thing.
I have read that every South Carolina widow gets a call of condolence from Strom Thurmond and that every high school graduate in the state gets a congratulatory call from him. He is very good politician in a very republican state.
FRK comes from a state full of yellow dog democrats and his personal vices and past crimes are so will known that he is innoculated against them.
Once a senator is in office for a long time he becomes very adept a constituent service that voting him out is very difficult.
Party officials tend to have great influence on who is nominated. These two Senators, any that have been in office a very long time, are viewed as a safe choice by the party.
And at some point, there’s the age factor that the public is resistent to. Who wants to fire grandpa?
—My curiosity is more how he gets elected after Chappaquiddick, alcoholism, infidelities, divorce, etc., when far lesser scandals that don’t involve death and cover-up have derailed the careers of other politicians.—
Because people expect those sort of things from a Kennedy. It’s almost a point of pride: this powerful aristocratic family with all these dark secrets.
Not to mention that the American public is nowhere near as worried about infidelity in politicians as the media, as long as they stake no claims to fidelity. What they care about is how well the pols do their jobs and deliver the goods.
