“I wasn’t born and raised here,” Knuff, a Boston native, explained unnecessarily at the event last week in this tidy planned community on Charleston’s outskirts.
Few of the 100 or so voters crowding the restaurant were born here. A man nearby dabbed syrup from a red Ohio State sweater. This is coastal Carolina, where newly minted Southerners, mostly retirees from colder climes, have created some of the state’s most moderate Republican enclaves during a decade of rapid population growth. If South Carolina were to contain any potential Huntsman Country, it would have been somewhere amid the golf courses and marshlands stretching between Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head.
“I’ve got to get my Southern accent going,” said Huntsman, bouncing slightly on his feet as he addressed the diners. Trim, tanned, and wearing a blazer and open-collared red shirt, he looked right at home in these resort environs, like a successful ophthalmologist just in from some morning tennis. “South Carolina is going to play a critical role,” said Huntsman, who barely registered a pulse in state polls.
Already his campaign was down to life-support; he and his wife, Mary Kaye, arrived in a one-car caravan for just the one South Carolina event before winging off to a last-ditch fundraiser in Manhattan (at the house of a woman named Rothschild, who almost certainly doesn’t take grits with her quiche).
The South Carolina endgame is going to be a rush job this year. The ever-tightening primary schedule has provided only 11 days after New Hampshire for the non-Romneys to sniff out voters not already on the Romney Ride-Along: mainly evangelicals, military voters, frustrated tea party activists, independents.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is stalking the country-cookin’ places around the mid-state Piedmont. After finishing last among major candidates in Iowa and finding fewer than 2,000 votes in New Hampshire, he’s looking for love along the steam tables of South Carolina: Duke’s Barbecue, Lizard’s Thicket, Doc’s, the Squat & Gobble.
“I was sharing with some folks out on the porch before I came in that Leesville is not that different from where I grew up,” Perry said to a crowd at Shealy’s Bar-be-cue in this tiny town west of the state capital. He talked happily about the washtub where he took baths on his boyhood home’s porch. He highlighted his Air Force service. He called Romney a “vulture capitalist,” a label designed to resonate in a manufacturing state with an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent. Perry wants more oil and gas pulled from federal lands, but he also hails “solar, wind and nuclear,” which, in the way of Texas governors, he pronounces “nuke-u-lar.”
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