South Carolina Shakeout

摘要

If Democrats are "running scared" in conservative South Carolina, as retiring Senator Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings declared this summer, you wouldn't know it from the number of Presidential candidates popping up here. Senator John F. Kerry announced his candidacy in Charleston. Senator John Edwards dropped in just hours after he officially threw his hat into the ring. Former General Wesley K. Clark made the Citadel, the famed military academy in Charleston, the second stop of his Presidential tour. And Al Sharpton has been there so often that one minister chuckled that the preacher from New York seemed ready to open a church. Why are all these candidates wooing voters in one of the most Republican-leaning electoral states in the country? The short answer is: They have to. Timing and an unusual cross-section of voters make South Carolina one of the hottest contests on the Democratic political calendar. Primary voters go to the polls on Feb. 3, just after the bellwether showdowns in Iowa and New Hampshire. That means candidates who come up short in those two early races could shore up their standing with a comeback in the Palmetto State―and try to stop a potential breakout by former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.