Senator John McCain capped his final full day of campaigning in South Carolina with a big rally in an aircraft carrier museum here on Friday evening, as Mike Huckabee delivered his populist economic message on the trail while highlighting his religious beliefs to draw out the evangelical vote in Saturday’s primary here.
As the campaign wound down here, its tone was in stark contrast to the lead-ups to the New Hampshire and Michigan primaries, and there was remarkably little direct sparring between Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee, the two leading candidates here, who seemed to be campaigning across the state on parallel paths, rather than engaging each other.
Mr. McCain campaigned along the Atlantic Coast, which has had big population increases in recent years, trying to appeal to veterans and military families by talking about improvements on the ground in the Iraq war, calling for better health care for veterans, and urging cuts in taxes and spending. Mr. Huckabee, meanwhile, worked the uplands, the state’s religious conservative heartland, and spoke at every stop about the economic pain that many South Carolinians are experiencing.
“A lot of Americans wonder, Does government understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck?” Mr. Huckabee said at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, noting that the state had hit its highest unemployment rate in years. “Do the people who live in the special bubble of the rarefied air of Washington, D.C., do they truly understand?”
A McCain/Huckabee or a Huckabee/McCain ticket is an interesting possibility. Both have their conservative positions and (relatively) liberal positions. Both seem to have a high level of integrity and fundamental decency.
Huckabee on the ticket, even in the second slot would, perhaps, satisfy our national preference for governors as president, certainly against a Clinton/Obama (senator + senator) ticket. I can only think of one man (Kennedy) elected straight from the senate in the past century.