Those Crazy Ass Governor Races

by Gary Phillips

There’s been some dang interesting news this past week or so which fed the machine. That is to say, given I mostly write fiction, I’m always on the lookout for plot ideas or odd characters or situations I can use in my stories, and a few recent races for governor have filled the bill nicely.

Take for instance this clown in South Carolina, state senator Jake Knotts ... please, take him. I’m sure you’ve read or seen reports about his comments concerning his fellow GOPer and representative, Nikki Haley, running for her party’s nomination of the yellow jasmine state, home to Stephen Colbert, James Dickey and James Brown.

Pontificating on the race in a bar, while being interviewed on an Internet radio show, PubPolitics, Knotts said of Haley, who is Indian-American, “We already got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion.” Knotts has been condemned by the South Carolina Republican Party and he’s maintained hey, he was just joking. “Bear in mind this is a freewheeling, anything goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It’s like a local political version of Saturday Night Live.”

Or Jackass Live, Jake. But here’s the part about this moron Knotts, and it ties into conspiracy theories, which as I’ve mentioned here on FourStory in my “Conspiracies-A-Go-Go” piece, is always juicy material. Haley, endorsed by the peripatetic Sarah Palin (not to be confused with having substance) was raised as a Sikh but converted to Christianity some years ago. For a good ol’ boy, God fearin’ soul like Knotts, by crackie, he ain’t buying it and knows the truth a là a Manchurian Candidate scenario.

Knotts has offered, with no proof of course, that Haley is the stalking agent for a secret cabal of Sikhs out to take over our way of life by altering our precious body fluids—okay, I stole that last bit from Dr. Strangelove, but Knotts did say the nonsense about the secret Sikh overseers. “We need a good Christian to be our governor,” he iterated. Oh, but it gets better.

A conservative blogger named Will Folks claimed to have had an inappropriate physical relationship with Haley in the past. Though this dude, who once worked as a spokesperson for Governor Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford (not to be confused with comic strip and radio series character Mark Trail), and who in 2005 was convicted of domestic abuse, claims he’s a supporter of hers.

Now has come along a fellow named Larry C. Marchant (not to be confused with the boxing world’s Larry Merchant) who also clams to have had an inappropriate one night stand with the married Ms. Haley. Marchant just happens to work for Haley’s opponent, also seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, the current Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, not to be confused with actor Andre Braugher.

Not only does Marchant seem like a Hair Club for Men client, his claim of sex with a woman has a more unlikely ring than does Folks’s. As Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out on The Daily Show, Marchant seems, ah, very southern ... very southern like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams very southern. And even though Bauer passed a lie detector test to show he had no hand in this allegation by Marchant, he’s out, and Haley faces fellow Representative J. Gresham Barrett in a June 22 runoff for the GOP nomination.

Suspicious characters in gubernatorial races gets me to my next news item, one you might not have seen so much in the news about. This past May down in Mexico, Cancun Mayor Gregorio Sanchez, a candidate for governor for the state his vacation spot city is in, Quintana Roo, was arrested for allegedly doing favors for the Beltran Leyva and Zetas drug gangs. Prosecutors contend Sanchez has withdrawn a couple million from his bank accounts, but his supporters say the money is from his real estate holdings. That’s some sweet property you got, Mr. Mayor.

But wait, there’s more. In a cave on the outskirts of the touristy Cancun, six bodies were recently found, two women and four men. There was evidence each was tortured; three of the bodies had their hearts cut out and three had the letter Z carved in the torsos. It doesn’t seem some madman in a Zorro costume is running around Cancun taking the law into his own hands, as the Zs are believed to refer to the Zeta gang.

Maybe the head of the gang is into some Aztec lore and has gotten on the sacrifice tip to appease whichever ancient god is supposed to protect drug lords. Or could be part of the vast secret Sikh conspiracy General Jack D. Ripper, I mean, Representative Jake “Knothead” Knotts was trying to warn us about. The hearts plucked beating from the chests of the victims then packed on dry ice in one of those hand-held coolers like you’d take on a picnic. The hearts were then transported by private jet to the underground headquarters of the head of the secret Sikhs. They’ve been plugged into their telepathy machine—which, you know, can only be powered by the hearts of virgins— that they maintain to read the thoughts of idiots like Knotts.

But you don’t have to go far for curiosities in governor races. Right here in the Golden State, we’ve had a doozey of a race, again on the Republican side. GOP gubernatorial candidate, billionaire and ex-eBay CEO, Meg Whitman won the nomination because she was willing to spend big—to the tune of something like $80 million and counting. Her main opponent, our insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, spent something like $20 million in his campaign. At one point he closed the fifty point gap between them and hit Whitman hard for not supporting Arizona’s newly minted anti-immigrant law.

But it’s tough beating someone who controlled her message so well; carpet bombing her commercials during American Idol, running a pretend half hour town hall infomercial and mailing her 48-page glossy full color magazine (also available for download) to about half a million likely Republican and independent voter households.

Too, though it didn’t come up much, This American Life pulled Poizner’s coattail with a piece they ran blasting him for exaggerations in his bestselling book, Mount Pleasant. Also a billionaire from his time in Silicon Valley, Poizner spent a semester as a volunteer teacher at an inner city high school in East San Jose seven years ago. Murphy (who seems to only go by the one name) on the Daily Kos summed it up best:

It looks like he [Poizner] created a narrative to use for his political ambitions and/or just plain made shit up. It also looks like he may have purchased enough copies up front himself to drive the book to #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list. (It dropped to #33 shortly thereafter.) He hasn’t admitted buying any copies, of course.

So no sex scandals or heartless bodies in caves, but hell, the race for governor of California has really just begun.

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