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      Don Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDon Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85He and Christopher Dodd ran the party organization, raising record sums, expanding the voter and donor bases, and sometimes raising eyebrows.Don Fowler taking the oath as he appeared before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1997. He had a long career in South Carolina and national politics.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressDec. 17, 2020, 5:07 p.m. ETDon Fowler, a former co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a mainstay of South Carolina and national politics for decades, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. He was 85.Trav Robertson, the chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, confirmed the death, at a hospital. Jaime Harrison, the associate chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Mr. Fowler had had leukemia.Mr. Fowler led the South Carolina party from 1971 to 1980 and was named by the national party to run the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, which launched Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts on an unsuccessful general election campaign against his Republican rival, Vice President George Bush.Mr. Fowler served as national chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997. He was picked by President Bill Clinton to run the party’s day-to-day operations in a power-sharing arrangement with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who was named general chairman.The two were credited with raising record-breaking sums for the party, deepening its pool of donors, expanding its army of volunteers and leading a successful voter-registration drive focusing on African-Americans, The Washington Post reported.Mr. Dodd, the more well known of the two, was largely the public face of the party leadership. But Mr. Fowler was thrust into the spotlight himself when he was accused of improperly trying to enlist the help of the C.I.A. in 1995 to aid a major donor to President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.The donor, an oilman who had developed a relationship with the C.I.A. on previous ventures, was seeking to build a pipeline in Turkey and sought help from the White House.Testifying to a Senate committee, Mr. Fowler professed that he could not remember speaking to a C.I.A. agent who claimed that he had done precisely that. “I have in the middle of the night, high noon, late in the afternoon, early in the morning, every hour of the day, for months now searched my memory about conversations with the C.I.A.,” Mr. Fowler told the senators. “And I have no memory, no memory of any conversation with the C.I.A.”He was not charged with any wrongdoing.Mr. Fowler, center, with President Bill Clinton and the actor Alec Baldwin at a reception in Culver City, Calif., in 1996 during Mr. Clinton’s re-election campaign. The president had named Mr. Fowler co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressMr. Fowler also found himself defending a plan to entice potential donors with a variety of perks in exchange for their dollars, including dinners with the Clintons, private meetings with administration officials, participation in “issue retreats” and “honored guest status” at the party’s 1996 convention in Chicago. In an editorial, The New York Times called the plan “seedy.”In 1996, Mr. Fowler successfully fought off a lawsuit by the fringe candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the fifth time. He filed the suit after Mr. Fowler had instructed state parties to disregard votes for him. Mr. Fowler had described Mr. LaRouche’s views as “explicitly racist and anti-Semitic” and had accused him of defrauding donors and voters. Mr. LaRouche was not, he said, “a bona fide Democrat.”Donald Lionel Fowler was born on Sept. 12, 1935, in Spartanburg, S.C. He earned a degree in psychology from Wofford College in Spartanburg, where he was a star basketball player; he was later inducted into its Hall of Fame. He received a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from the University of Kentucky.While holding his political posts and running an advertising and public relations business in Columbia, he taught political science for five decades at the University of South Carolina and also at the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college.His first wife, Septima (Briggs) Fowler, with whom he had two children, died in 1997. In 2005, Mr. Fowler married Carol Khare. They had worked together at the Democratic National Committee and at his communications firm. Carol Fowler became chair of the state party in 2007.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.This year, the Fowlers’ home in the Five Points area of Columbia, the state capital, became a regular stop for many Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination in the run-up to the South Carolina primary in February. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Bill de Blasio were among those who showed up as dozens of people crowded into the Fowlers’ living room.Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House majority whip and a frequent guest lecturer in Mr. Fowler’s classes, told the South Carolina newspaper The State, “Don was always the connector, the one bringing political friends and, sometimes, enemies together.”The New York Times contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The upset of 2020? Jaime Harrison push to oust Lindsey Graham central to US Senate battle

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      Jaime Harrison, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in South Carolina, has raised a staggering $57m in the third quarter of 2020, a new record for a single Senate race in the southern state, and anywhere else in America for that matter.But Harrison’s race is also winning attention for a host of other reasons. His opponent is incumbent Lindsey Graham, a close Donald Trump ally and vocal cheerleader for the president. In conservative South Carolina, Graham was meant to be a certainty to retain his seat, especially against a nationally little-known Black Democrat at a time when anti-racism protests have roiled America.But 2020 is anything but a normal election year. Not only has Harrison set new money-raising records, but his polling has hauled him into unexpected contention in a state no one saw as vulnerable for the Republicans. That in itself could help Democrats win a victory in the Republican-controlled Senate that few saw as likely even a year ago and radically alter the direction of America’s politics.Harrison’s candidacy is proving historic and has caught major national attention. If he beats Graham, South Carolina would become the first state with two sitting African American senators ever. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott is one of the few African American senators in the chamber, and the only Black Republican. Other states have been represented by African Americans but never at the same time. There have been 1,974 members of the US senate since it was established in 1789 – only 10 have been Black.South Carolina has emerged, surprisingly, as one of the best chances Democrats have to get the three or four seats needed to retake control of the Senate. Although there is intense interest in the race for the White House the battle to control the Senate which will also have a huge impact on the shape of the next presidency.If Trump was to win the Presidency but Republicans lose control of the Senate it would severely limit the legislation that he could get passed. Similarly, if Biden was to win the White House but the Democrats failed to win control of the Senate, it would mean that much of the new president’s legislative programme would be dead on arrival in Washington DC. As Molly Reynolds, of the DC-based think tank Brookings said recently, “The presidential race has captured most of the recent election-related headlines. But a set of key Senate races will have significant consequences for the ability of former Vice President Joe Biden to govern if he defeats President Donald Trump.”It is not too long ago that the prospects of Democrats winning control of the Senate seemed somewhat outlandish. But the shifting dynamics of the 2020 race have put the Senate into play.The influx of campaign funding that has eclipsed Republicans in South Carolina has also been mirrored elsewhere. Democratic candidates in a diverse list of states such as Maine, Montana, Colorado, Iowa and even reliably red Kansas, find themselves with healthy war chests in the last few weeks before the 3 November election.…….The 44-year old South Carolina Democrat has run in Democratic circles for years. But it didn’t start out that way. Harrison was born when his mother was 15. His father was his mother’s high school boyfriend and out of the picture for much of his childhood. His grandparents played a large role in raising him. Harrison grew up poor in Orangeburg, a town of tens of thousands, and went on to graduate from Yale University on scholarship and Georgetown University’s law school. Harrison was a teacher, served as a chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, an aide to the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, and then a lobbyist.Harrison’s association with Clyburn is a boon in South Carolina. Clyburn is the most influential African American Democrat in Congress and his endorsement was a critical point in helping resuscitate Joe Biden’s presidential campaign during the Democratic primary. Clyburn has shown cautious optimism of Harrison’s chances.“I think things are breaking in his favor. If we get the kind of turnout that we’ve been working on in South Carolina,” Clyburn said in an interview with Politico.At first, the 2020 South Carolina Senate race seemed like a long shot for Democrats. Republicans have controlled both Senate seats in the state for 15 years. But Graham’s close association with Trump and, for others, with the late Arizona senator John McCain as well as his defense of now-supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh during the justice’s confirmation hearings are what Republicans and Democrats now attribute to strong antagonism toward the senator. Graham is also a golf buddy of Trump’s.“I think the reason we’re here is primarily twofold. One, the Democrats are just hellbent on controlling the Senate and pining for power,” said South Carolina Republican strategist Walter Whetsell, who is helping advise a Super Pac backinWhetsell said Democrats “hate Lindsey Graham for what he did on Kavanaugh. They despise this guy. They want vengeance. They want revenge. And you combine these two things and it’s like smoking in a fireworks stand. It’s going to explode, right?”……..In an interview with the Guardian Harrison pointed out that Graham’s seat is one that had been occupied by some of the most vocal segregationists in American history. It would be a dramatic contrast for an African American to inherit it.“The seat that I’m vying for also is a seat that has its own history. This is the seat of John C Calhoun, of Strom Thurmond, of a man called Ben Tillman who talked about lynching black folks on the US Senate.”With his most recent fundraising haul, Harrison will also show what a Democratic campaign in South Carolina can do with such a huge amount of money. Harrison said his campaign planned to use the money to flood the zone in an all-out effort to win the seat for Democrats.Most recent polls of the Senate race show a low-single-digit margin betweenHarrison and Graham. A New York Times/Siena College poll of the race published on Thursday found Graham leading Harrison by six percentage points.Harrison’s chances in South Carolina now rest in part on whether enough Republicans decide not to vote for Graham, either by not voting at all or backing the former Constitution party candidate Bill Bledsoe, a conservative whose name will still appear on ballots even though he dropped out and endorsed Graham. More

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      Jaime Harrison sets Senate fundraising record in race against Lindsey Graham

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      South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison has shattered congressional fundraising records, bringing in $57m in the final quarter for his US Senate campaign against Republican incumbent and Trump ally Lindsey Graham as the Republican party tries to retain control of the chamber in November’s election.Harrison’s campaign said Sunday that the total was the largest-ever during a single three-month period by any Senate candidate. That tops the $38m raised by Democrat Beto O’Rourke in 2018 in the final fundraising period of his challenge to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who won the race.Graham, a longtime senator, is tied with Harrison in a highly competitive race.Graham hasn’t released fundraising totals for the previous quarter, although it’s likely he’s been eclipsed by Harrison. Last month, Graham made a public plea for fundraising to help him keep up with Harrison, saying on Fox News that he was “getting killed financially” by Harrison, who he predicted would “raise $100m in the state of South Carolina.”“The money is because they hate my guts,” Graham added.At the end of June, both candidates were roughly matched at about $30m apiece, money that has come largely from out of-state donors. For the race overall, not including the most recent quarter, Harrison’s in-state contribution amount is 10%. Graham’s is 14%.“This campaign is making history, because we’re focused on restoring hope back to South Carolina,” said Guy King, Harrison’s campaign spokesman. “While Lindsey Graham continues playing political games in Washington, Jaime Harrison is remaining laser-focused on the real issues impacting people here – like health care, broadband access, and Covid relief for businesses and families.”The latest fundraising report comes one day before the start of what is predicted to be a contentious hearing in the Senate judiciary committee on Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. Graham is the committee chairman.His commitment to confirming Trump’s third nominee to the court has become a focal point in the Senate campaign, with Harrison frequently chiding Graham for reversing on previous promises not to consider election-year nominations. Graham has responded by saying he feels Democrats would do the same if given the choice.Attributing the fundraising success to grassroots support, Harrison’s campaign said the $57m came in the form of 1.5m donations from 994,000 donors. The average contribution was $37.During Harrison’s debate with Graham on 3 October, social media users across the country chimed into tweet threads with pledges to donate as often as they could. In the two days following that matchup, Harrison’s campaign said they brought in $1.5m – as much as the effort had raised in some previous entire fundraising quarters.At the beginning of the campaign, Harrison, an associate Democratic National Committee chairman, told The Associated Press he felt it could take $10m to win the race, an amount he felt he could raise given his national-level connections. To date, he has brought in nearly $86m. More

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      'Our belongings were put out on the street': the Democrat drawing on experience to fight evictions

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      In one of the worst cities for evictions in the US, North Charleston, South Carolina, state representative Marvin Pendarvis’s push for more tenant protections is personal.When he was just 12, his family was evicted from their North Charleston home and the memory still haunts him.“I can remember being served with an eviction notice,” Pendarvis said. “I can remember having our belongings put out on the street.”The 30-year-old Democrat has worked to improve renter protections since entering politics, but the issue has taken on new urgency because of the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis and racial injustice protests.Housing advocates across the country are bracing for a surge in evictions after the expiration of federal programs to help the unemployed during the pandemic. The firm Stout Risius Ross predicted 185,000 evictions could be filed in South Carolina in the next four months. Those most at risk of eviction are low-income women of color.After Pendarvis was evicted in the early 2000s, he and his sisters moved frequently to live with different family members and friends.“It’s hard to be engaged in academics, it’s hard to be engaged in anything, when you know that all of your friends are going back home at the end of the day and you don’t know where you’re going yet,” Pendarvis said. “Sometimes you wish the school day would last as long as possible … just because you know that for those few hours, six, seven hours of the day, that you’ll be fed, you’ll be housed and you’ll feel safe and comfortable.”Pendarvis said after he spoke publicly about being evicted, a handful of politicians contacted him to share similar experiences.Ultimately though, South Carolina’s political class – like that of much of the US – is more representative of landlords than renters.That’s what I look at as my role: to try to bring awareness to people and show them evictions are happeningThe state’s governor, Henry McMaster, is a landlord and has collected rent from his more than 200 tenants through the pandemic, according to the Post and Courier newspaper. It was the state supreme court, not its politicians, that passed a now-expired coronavirus eviction moratorium.“It’s just not gotten the attention it needs to address it in a meaningful way through politics,” Pendarvis said. “That’s what I look at as my role: to try to bring awareness to people and show them evictions are happening.”Pendarvis has been publicizing individual cases of eviction to local media, advising residents in his capacity as a practicing attorney and pushing legislation to address issues which disproportionately affect the city he represents.“I get a call every day – literally – a call or an email or a text or a Facebook message or a tweet from someone in my district, and even beyond my district, that is dealing with eviction,” Pendarvis said. “Or someone who has been laid off from their job and they’re looking at what to do with unemployment and what’s going to happen with that.”As a representative for a 41,000-person district, which is 51% Black, the racial injustice protests that have roiled America this summer further focused his efforts to fight for improvements to housing law, healthcare and food insecurity in the state.I came to the conclusion I’ve got to do morePendarvis participated in the protests and said they inspired him to re-evaluate his work. He also became a father for the first time in April and asked himself what he wanted to tell his son he was doing in the summer of 2020.“I came to the conclusion I’ve got to do more,” he said.This summer’s racial equality protests formed in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it was the police killing of another Black man, Walter Scott, that catalyzed Pendarvis’s entry into public service.A few months after Pendarvis graduated law school, Scott was shot dead while running away from a police officer who had pulled him over for a traffic violation. Three months later, a white teenager killed nine black people in a church in downtown Charleston.“You had two really, really traumatic events that took place in our city that shook me and forced me to think about my role in addressing some of the issues that led to what happened,” Pendarvis said.He ran for city council, lost, and decided to try again in 2019. But a statehouse representative resigned in 2017 and Pendarvis successfully campaigned for the seat. He was re-elected in 2018 and decisively won the Democratic primary in June. He does not face a Republican challenger in November.Pendarvis thinks the US needs to do much more to be sure that after the virus is under control, citizens aren’t further burdened by lingering health disparities, unemployment and food insecurity.Pendarvis said: “My community is going to be decimated after this virus from an economic standpoint and even a health standpoint, and the question is how do we ensure they are able to recover properly?” More

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      Kanye West makes chaotic presidential rally debut in South Carolina – video

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      In the first rally of his last-minute presidential campaign, Kanye West delivers rambling remarks at a South Carolina convention centre. The venue appeared to lack audience microphones, so the rapper repeatedly asked the crowd to be silent. ‘Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet,’ he tells the crowd, before saying the American abolitionist Harriet Tubman ‘never actually freed the slaves. She just had the slaves work for other white people.’ Members of the audience can be heard saying, ‘Y’all, we’re leaving now’
      God, abortion and better acoustics: Kanye West launches campaign with chaotic rally

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      South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn: 'If Biden doesn't win, US democracy will crumble'

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      Interview Daniel Strauss The highest ranking African American Democrat in House leadership talks about Black Lives Matter, reforms and the 2020 US election Jim Clyburn at a news conference in Washington DC on 8 June 2020. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn has been at the heart of some of the most pivotal […] More