Tim Scott won’t wear your left-wing label
by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter |
NORTH CHARLESTON, South Carolina — All that is left of the lot where Sen. Tim Scott’s house stood on Meeting Street Road is a desolate field filled with dirt, gravel, and mounds of weed-choked grass. The poverty and crime rates in this neighborhood are consistently higher than the national averages. Some people, says Scott, call it a “nobody zone.”
But Scott, the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, once called it home.
It was here that he lived with his grandfather, mother, and brother on the wrong side of the poverty line after his parents separated. Five family members shared two bedrooms; Scott shared a bed with his brother.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, the rising Republican star, now talked of as a future presidential candidate, said the property where he grew up is an example of “the beauty of America,” where “in the most insignificant places from the outside, there’s always significance on the inside.”
America helps write such stories. “Always has, always will. So, when I think about the story behind that empty lot today, and I have lots of pictures of what it looked like when I was there, I think about high-potential people living in places where most people don’t visit.”
Scott’s story is a characteristic American narrative of redemption. “It’s the story that even though you fall or find yourself in a tough situation, it’s not the end of your story.” Scott’s story has already seen him become the first African American to serve in both the House and the Senate.
Scott is clearly the author of his own story. It’s not derivative, and it doesn’t fit into the hackneyed narrative provided by the Left for racial minorities. Scott’s originality and refusal to be stereotyped rankle his left-wing critics and confound much of the political media, which see America as a land not of opportunity but of oppression, a place where a man’s politics should be determined by his skin color or his class.
“America is not a racist country,” Scott bluntly and bravely declared to millions of television viewers who watched him deliver the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s first speech to Congress. “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.”
It was an incendiary truth and, of course, lit the Left on fire.
“That’s absurd,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said of Scott’s assertion. Other detractors went further. “Tim Scott complained about being called an Uncle Tom and then 60 seconds later said America is not a racist country,” said former MSNBC host Toure Neblett, apparently seeing Scott as a race-traitor. For laughs, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel portrayed Scott as a brainless servant of white Republicans on his show after the speech.
The Left’s hidebound idea that the opinions of the country’s racial minorities are preset by white elites makes Scott incomprehensible to many of his detractors. It also makes him dangerous to them and to the way they see the world. Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler published a bizarre column insinuating that, because other families were poorer than Scott’s, the senator was being misleading when he talked about his family going in two generations from picking cotton to serving in Congress.
This strange episode would have been impossible if not for the common left-of-center bewilderment that Scott isn’t who Democrats think he should be.
So, who is he?
The Politician
Scott struggled with academics in high school, but he did have a notable breakthrough: He won his junior year race for student vice president. Then, he won again when he ran in his senior year for student president.
It was the last nonpartisan election in which he competed.
It was while he was in high school that he met John Moniz, a Citadel graduate and Air Force veteran who owned a Chick-fil-A restaurant across from the Northwoods mall movie theater where the teenage Scott worked. The two struck up a friendship, and Scott flourished under Moniz’s guidance. When Moniz died suddenly in 1985, Scott was devastated. “Over the course of three or four years, John transformed my way of thinking, which changed my life,” Scott wrote in a 2010 op-ed about mentorship for the Post and Courier. “It was interesting because the lessons that John was teaching me were maybe simple lessons, but they were profound lessons."
"He taught me that if you want to receive, you have to first give. Embedded in that conversation, I came to realize, was the concept that my mother was teaching me about individual responsibility.”
College for Scott was a tussle between football and faith. Faith won. Yet politics for him was always part of that. In 1994, he won a seat on the Charleston County Council. He ran again a short time later for state senator and lost, which made him consider becoming a religious minister. But Scott quickly found that he didn’t have to choose between faith and politics, and he moved forward by building a life built on both. He wound up serving on the county council for 13 years and eventually won a state legislative House seat in 2008.
After briefly considering a run for lieutenant governor, he instead ran for Congress in 2010, after the GOP incumbent Henry Brown abruptly retired. The contest pitted him against Carroll Campbell, son of a popular former governor, and Paul Thurmond, son of the famous Sen. Strom Thurmond.
He won and rode into Washington, D.C., on the Tea Party wave. Fellow South Carolinian Trey Gowdy recalls that even among the high number of new freshman Republicans, everyone knew Scott was at a higher level than the rest.
“He was the Elvis Presley of our class and could have been easily without opposition the freshman class president but didn’t want to run,” Gowdy told the Washington Examiner.
Although Gowdy is from the same state as Scott, they had not met before freshman orientation in Washington. But Gowdy already knew who Scott was.
“I was sitting there, reading my hometown newspaper, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, and it said there was going to be a lieutenant governor’s debate at Wofford College, which is a really good small liberal arts school in my hometown,” Gowdy explained.
He looked to see who was crazy and dumb enough to run for a part-time job that paid little and saw Scott’s name on the list. When he picked up the newspaper the next day, he read that Scott hadn’t bothered to show up for the debate. “I thought, well, heck, that guy’s got no future in politics. I mean, he can’t even show up."
Gowdy was quickly disabused when Scott ran instead for the House of Representatives “from the same district where the Civil War began.”
The two men quickly formed a bond. “I think he was looking for someone that he could talk to in confidence that didn’t want anything, and I was just looking for somebody whose accent I could understand.”
Gowdy said they met each evening despite Scott’s busy schedule and the curiosity he received from the press. It was soon clear that news media were interested in Scott not for his ideas but because of the color of his skin.
“Tim has this happy warrior approach in him similar to both Reagan and Jack Kemp where he can authentically show how conservatism can work for everyone. Take, for example, his work on the opportunity zones; it was the perfect legislative vehicle by which to express that, but while he was trying talking about educational opportunity and choice and poverty, the D.C. media likes to go talk to him about race-related issues,” Gowdy explained.
“He understands why they want to talk to him about race because he is the only black Republican senator, but, I mean, he also helped write the tax bill; why don’t they want to talk to him about that?”
The Antidote
The answer is, in part, because Scott is a living, breathing rebuke to the idea that America is a racist country. He exists outside the Left’s cultural narrative, in which black people are Democrats and left-wing. The media’s refusal to see anything but Scott’s skin color is an attempt to force him to fit the narrative. Scott is a threat to the activist media because the truth is contagious: When he stated that “America is not a racist country,” it was a powerful enough message, given its source, that it forced President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to face it. They were asked for their reaction, which pinned them down. And rather than contradict him by saying that America was racist, they both agreed with Scott, implicitly contradicting the argument they had made throughout their path to the White House.
Scott is not new to the culture’s denial of black individuality. “As a kid growing up in poverty in South Carolina in ‘70, ‘71, ‘72, when my parents divorced, people sometimes see you as a statistic,” he said. “They talk about all these project kids. … So, people see you as a statistic and not really as an individual. And to me, one of the greatest cravings of the soul is individual significance.”
In 2017, HuffPost writer Andy Ostroy tweeted that Scott was given a front-row seat during Donald Trump’s tax reform press event as a ploy to exploit the color of his skin.
“What a shocker,” wrote Ostroy. “There’s ONE black person there and sure enough they have him standing right next to the mic like a manipulated prop. Way to go @SenatorTimScott.”
Scott, who played an integral role in putting the bill together, was having none of it and responded: “Uh probably because I helped write the bill for the past year, have multiple provisions included, got multiple Senators on board over the last week and have worked on tax reform my entire time in Congress. But if you’d rather just see my skin color, pls feel free.”
Scott gave an emotional speech on the Senate floor that same year after Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, referred to his police reform bill as “token” legislation.
“To call this a token process hurts my soul for my country, for our people,” Scott said of Durbin’s response to the Justice Act, which would have made lynching a federal hate crime, incentivized police departments to ban chokeholds, and included emergency grant programs for body cameras.
For Scott, Kessler’s column in the Washington Post was a perfect example of racism from white elites who insist on black ideological and intellectual conformity: “To write a story that questions whether or not my grandfather had to pick cotton when he was a kid, a black kid in 1928 on a farm? OK. And your family are founding executives of the Royal Dutch Shell petroleum company? You’re writing about my family, and you’re raising questions unnecessarily? My reaction to that was not as good as it could be.”
Scott has been navigating the issue of race since childhood. “When you’re 7 years old and you’re in a single-parent household and you’re one of very few black kids in your classroom in your school, people will label you, and that label sticks,” he said. “Kids, particularly, have a way of making the outsider feel like they are outside. And so, I wore that label. … Being good at sports will make you more cool than other things, so you become a jock, and that’s a label, too, and so I wore that label. When you are poor and you have three or four pairs of pants, and you got to wear them every week and you got holes in your shoes, so you put a little cardboard in the bottom of them and people make fun of you, you wear that label,” he said.
The Contender
Scott is up for reelection in 2022 for the Senate seat he has held since 2013, when then-Gov. Nikki Haley appointed him to replace Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. He has pledged to serve only two six-year terms, which naturally raises the question of what comes next, and presents the possibility of a run for president. The noise about this next step has increased sharply since he gave his widely acclaimed speech last month.
Scott is undeniably on the minds of Republican voters as they consider 2024 and beyond. If Donald Trump doesn’t run, the field of contenders is wide open, and it might be the perfect time for Scott to step forward. He would be a formidable candidate in both the primaries and general, not least because it would force the nation to scrutinize the repeated assertion of racism among the GOP’s blue-collar voters. A Scott candidacy would also scramble preconceived notions of modern conservative politics propagated by the media.
Scott isn’t addressing the question of the presidency, yet. But Gowdy is.
“I absolutely think he should run, and I think he should run regardless of the outcome,” said Gowdy, adding that Scott could change the world even in a losing campaign. “I think his candidacy would be fantastic for the country.”
Gowdy said Scott takes nothing for granted, despite his popularity. “I mean, if Lindsey Graham had Tim’s poll numbers, well, first of all, he’d die of a heart attack due to excitement and joy,” he said. Gowdy recently looked at data on how Scott might do in a gubernatorial race. “So, we’re looking at it together, and his primary approval numbers were like 93. And I’m sitting there looking at him, and … I know what’s getting ready to happen. He wants to know who the 7 are, and what can he do to get things right with that 7%.”
The idea that Scott would make a White House run makes Gowdy emotional. “Because most Republicans are white,” he said, “I don’t think they have any real appreciation for what he goes through as a black conservative; I mean, you can call me “Uncle Trey” and that means nothing to me.” Gowdy was referring to Twitter’s decision to let “Uncle Tim” trend for 12 hours after Scott’s national speech.
“Most Republicans have no idea how painful that is. The easy thing for him to do would be to do what I did and check out and go do something else, make money for a living,” said Gowdy, who has retired from politics.
“And there he is, still in the fight, keeps his head down, not be part of these issues. So, I think what people don’t know, because they can’t know unless they see it through somebody else’s eyes, is just how difficult it is for a black man to be a Republican, at the level that he is in politics.”
Gowdy struggles to keep his composure, choking back tears. “And his love for the country, because there are certainly easier ways for ... I mean, as a United States senator, who would be on a half-dozen boards if he left tomorrow — that could forever take care of his mom. … And there he is continuing, and going to be on the ballot again.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/tim-scott-wont-wear-your-left-wing-label
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