Keep hearing that, but it’s not like when you cross the border into SC the devil meets you at the airport. Politics in SC aren’t any more amoral or immoral than NH or IA, it’s that the candidates get more desperate by the time an election gets there. Survival is on the menu along with the shrimp and grits. So yeah, that’s when you pull out the push poll saying your opponent has a black child.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.