SECONDARY COLORS :

AFTER STROM : Can a cracker-barrel fabulist capture South Carolina's Senate seat? (JOE KLEIN, 2002-05-06, The New Yorker)

"Do you want to know what I do all day?" asked Alex Sanders, who is the Democratic candidate seeking to replace Strom Thurmond as United States senator from South Carolina this year. "I sit at a desk with a telephone. A woman named Ashley Newton sits across from me with pieces of paper called focus sheets and a stopwatch. She hands me a focus sheet, which has the name and phone number and some vital information about a potential contributor. I call the number. She starts the stopwatch. I have six minutes to make the sale. I'm supposed to make ten calls per hour. So I start out like this: 'Hello, my name is Alex Sanders, and I'm running for the United States Senate. Have you ever heard of me in your whole entire life?' Then I chat with him for a moment about life at his horse farm, or whatever. I tell him that I know about the horse farm because I have this focus sheet with all his information. And then I say, 'I'm not calling to ask for your vote. It'd be a waste of time to make a phone call for a single vote. My purpose is far more humiliating. It's the chemotherapy of a political campaign. It's painful.' " He paused. " 'Wouldja give me some money?' "

Sanders is sixty-three, but his sensibility seems much older-from the time before radio, when people entertained each other by telling yarns. He is a burly, deliberate man, with heavy-lidded eyes that appear to require some miracle of physiological hydraulics, perhaps involving support from his eyebrows, in order to remain open. He has a weathered, scratchy voice and a thick, juicy Carolina accent. Every word he utters is carefully unpacked, inspected, reassembled, and inflected, usually in the service of drollery. "Chemotherapy," for example, comes out something like this: keh-moh-THER-peh, with a chuckle embedded in the middle. He is considered an underdog in the race to replace Thurmond; his opponent, Representative Lindsey Graham, is formidable. South Carolina is a Republican state. But Sanders's success or failure hardly seems the point-and Graham is almost an afterthought. The real contest here is between an American archetype, the cracker-barrel fabulist, and the consultant-driven sterility of the current political system.

God help us; Joe Klein has fallen in love with another Southerner. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2002 12:29 PM