South Carolina’s Martin Luther King Day Campaign Rally: A local perspective

By Ryan Bowman
January 24th, 2008 at 01:54pm
Politics

Our man in South Carolina (ok, ok, my dad–see photo below) went to yesterday’s Martin Luther King rally in the streets of Columbia, the state capital and, more importantly, my hometown and reports a genial but rather inspiring scene (he also took that nice picture of the State House):

The preliminary speeches lasted for ~ 1 1/2 hours but it seemed longer because it was colder that hell, below freezing with a little wind. In spite of the cold, the crowd was incredibly polite and in very good spirits. The confederate flag people were also there…pitiful group …..they were ignored by everyone. The introductory speeches lambasted SC for being last in most everything including recognizing the MLK holiday, education, health care, etc. The candidates were given 10 min to speak and were extremely polite and complementary to each other (though Hillary and Obama were at each others’ throats later in the day at the debate. It sounded like an exchange from middle school.) They all gave excellent speeches. I personally thought Hillary’s was the best. She talked about MLK’s legacy and was, thankfully, not in “vote for me” stump speech mode, she was somewhat moving. I do think she had no choice given that she was slightly in trouble because of the (basically manufactured) MLK controrversy and so forth. Edwards gave more of a stump speech……and Obama was slick and tried to give people a vision. All the candidates were favorably, even lovingly received. I also met a cool Labrador retriever there.

It was apparently quite an event, the normally quiet Main St. was jammed full of media and on lookers. It made for some strange but moving scenes, gospel choirs, a huge and welcome NAACP presence, palm trees in freezing weather (see picture if you don’t believe me), and more media than the whole state has seen all year. The most interesting thing about my dad’s report is that Hillary was so inspiring. For me, this campaign, has always come down to a battle of two candidates defined by their relative strengths: Obama is a visionary and inspiring speaker, he specializes in spine tingles; Clinton is more an analytical debater, full of practical knowledge that she accesses with incredible speed. To hear that she is improving her skills in the dark art of inspirational speaking is bad news for Obama…

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