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COLUMBIA, South Carolina: Gloves have come off as the wide-open
Republican presidential race heads to South Carolina, with John
McCain experiencing a reprise of the tough tactics that lost him the
state eight years ago.
Mitt Romney barely got a day to savor his
Michigan victory before the next battlefront opened in the
conservative southern state, where the former Massachusetts governor
is trailing McCain, who won the New Hampshire primary, and Mike
Huckabee, who swept the Iowa caucuses that opened the 2008 race.
Pundits saw the fight for the Republican
nomination to contest the presidency in November 2008 as still wide
open, and looked to see how South Carolina’s bare-knuckle politics
could shape the contest.
It was unclear how Romney’s message of
economic renewal and fixing a “broken” Washington would play in
South Carolina, a largely rural state with relatively high poverty
and a large, albeit mostly Democratic, black minority.
The state is renowned for a brew of political
dirty tricks, hawkish national security voters and an influential
block of anti-abortion, pro-gun rights evangelical conservatives who
may favor former Baptist minister Huckabee.
The latest Zogby poll heralded a tough battle in
the state, with McCain ahead at 29 percent, Huckabee second with 23
percent and Romney in third with 13 percent.
South Carolina’s no-holds-barred campaign
tactics surfaced when McCain’s campaign intercepted a flyer by a
shadowy group called Vietnam Veterans Against McCain that said he
had sold out his comrades when he was a prisoner of war in North
Vietnam.
The incident smacked of the notorious
allegations in the 2000 campaign in South Carolina that McCain had
fathered an African-American baby out of wedlock, bogus stories that
cost him the state and ultimately the party nomination.
Meanwhile contenders for the Democratic
nomination waged their battle in western Nevada State, which holds
its nominating caucuses on Saturday as well.
Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
nearly evenly matched in national polls, sparred for points about
how each would lead the country out of its economic gloom.
Obama spoke Wednesday in Henderson, Nevada,
seeking to balance his pitches to the state’s large unions and its
equally large Latino immigrant population by detailing how he would
handle the highly sensitive issue of illegal immigration from Latin
America.
Clinton, meanwhile, took aim at Obama’s remark
in Tuesday’s debate that the government needs a leader and not a
bureaucrat making sure schedules are being met.
-- AFP
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