By Louise Mathews
I expect that if you are holding this newspaper, you are probably using it to fan yourself. I am beginning to believe that this fifth season of Hell’s Front Porch may never come to an end.
Last week, my husband and I returned from a sojourn at Devil’s Fork State Park on Lake Jocassee. In previous August visits, we enjoyed cooling breezes off the lake. This year, it was hot, perhaps five degrees cooler than in Beaufort.
On some afternoons, nearby thunderstorms brought the temperature down to the mid-eighties, but the only really cool time occurred between 11 p.m., and 7 a.m., when I was asleep in our air-conditioned camper.
Still, we had a good time. There is something elemental about camping. We get down to the bare bones of what we really need. Our living room and kitchen are outside. We have a tiny K-cup coffee brewer, a three-gallon water dispenser, a camp stove, a box fan, and the thing my husband finds most essential, an ice maker.
We use the microwave and the dorm-room sized refrigerator inside the camper. Otherwise, we just sleep in the camper. South Carolina state park campgrounds have very nice bathhouses for daily necessities.
Other than the clarity of Lake Jocassee water, perhaps the best part of camping is being able to unplug. We reviewed emails, texts, and news stories on our phones, but I find reading or watching videos on a tiny screen difficult. During the week, I finally finished “Confronting the Presidents,” which I had put down in July midway through the 19th century.
There is nothing new under the sun, at least in politics.
In the 1912 presidential election, more than 15 million recently arrived immigrants voted for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. The party had actively recruited immigrants. Many believe the Democrats have been following this same playbook.
When he was sheriff of Erie County, New York, Democrat Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate son. He hired a group of men to abduct the child and had its mother incarcerated in an asylum. Eleven years later, Cleveland won the presidency despite the awful story having emerged in the newspapers. Later, 49-year-old Cleveland married t21-year-old Frances Folsom, who became the Jacqueline Kennedy of her day.
My high school American History teacher declared that once women achieved the right to vote, they elected the handsomest President the nation had seen, Republican Warren G. Harding. Harding’s only child, born out of wedlock to his then mistress, arrived two weeks before Election Day, but no one knew about it until after Harding’s death.
Cleveland and Harding make the tawdry Clinton situation seem minor. At least children were not involved in the Lewinsky Affair.
Presidents sometimes disappeared from duty. Cleveland had surgery to remove two tumors from his mouth and was not seen for six months during the financial Panic of 1893. Woodrow Wilson suffered three strokes while President and was incapacitated for much of his last year as President. His wife Edith shielded him and ran the country.
As we did in the last year of the Biden presidency, many people then questioned who was running the country.
In 1948, Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared to have lost the Texas Democratic primary until six days after the election when a box of 202 uncounted ballots appeared. Amazingly, 200 of the 202 ballots were cast for Johnson, which put him over the top by 87 votes. From the Senate, Johnson moved into the vice presidency and the presidency due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1977 – after Johnson’s death – the Associated Press broke a story that the mysterious 1948 ballots were phony.
Reading of these high crimes and misdemeanors in the beauty of the Uplands provided me with a sense of detachment that I have not felt about recent and current political events. The latest political buzz in my mind is the run-off between Darline Graham Nordone and Ralph Norman. I do not have a problem with the appointment of family members to fill a deceased elected official’s tenure, particularly if that unfulfilled term is of short duration. I do have a problem when a deceased elected official’s family member becomes the candidate.
I am sure Darline Graham Nordone, who has curiously become just Darline Graham in recent weeks, is a lovely lady. She may have been an excellent leader for the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, but her job performance does not seem to matter. President Trump has endorsed her because she will do whatever he tells her to do.
I am troubled because she did not even attempt to answer a softball question about the United States’ relationship with Taiwan. While she was honest about her ignorance, she sounded like a lady at a church social begging forgiveness for putting too much salt in the potato salad.
Ralph Norman at least has a legislative record, and he does know about the hot spot in the South China Sea. Because he has a record, he can be attacked, and mud has been flying.
I am hoping I live long enough to vote in an election in which I don’t have to gauge the lesser of two evils.
Louise Mathews retired from a career in community colleges and before that, theater. A 13-year come-here in Beaufort, she has been a dingbatter in North Carolina and an upstater from New York.