Filler: Tim Scott a solid choice for U.S. Senate

Hooray for Tim Scott, and South Carolina, and even for Gov. Nikki Haley, who just made  her first good decision in years.

Scott, the 47-year-old Republican congressman from Charleston, was announced by Haley today as her choice to replace Jim DeMint in the United States Senate. DeMint is leaving to run the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, make a few bucks, and get away from his role in the minority of the chamber, because being in the minority in the Senate for him is much like not being in the Senate at all. But at around $800,000 per year less. So Scott will be the only black member of the Senate, and the first black senator from the South since the 19th century. Meaning the only black U.S. senator is from South Carolina and a conservative.

It’s an oddly strange and sometimes contradictory world we live in, as his story shows.

Having worked as a journalist in South Carolina for years, I know Tim Scott a bit, and I like him very much. That’s something I have in common with nearly everyone who’s ever met the guy.

He came up from the grassroots, serving more than a decade on the Charleston City Council. He owns his own insurance agency, he is seriously right-wing on social and fiscal issues. And he’s a delightfully humble, friendly thoughtful man.

Scott came from a broken, impoverished home. According to his own accounts, he was flailing and failing, in high school and in life, until he got a job at a local Chick-fil-A and was taken under the wing of the franchise’s owner.

This is, by the way, a very, very common story in the South, which is why the controversy over Chick-fil-A and gay rights has been so painful for so many people, even liberals and gays. The owners, I think, are misguided on that issue, but anyone who lives in a community Chick-fil-A serves will tell you that company does more for the schools, the neighborhoods and its employees and their families than pretty much any other business around.

I got to know Scott when he was running for his first term in Congress (he was elected to his second last month) and I was working on a piece for the Spartanburg Herald Journal about whether the tea party, from which he got so much of his support, was a racist movement. Not surprisingly, he argued that it wasn’t, and that it wasn’t even a socially conservative movement. Scott said it was mostly just about fiscal conservatism and taxation, and the “Birthers” and conspiracy theorists were really a separate thing.
I think he was somewhat (but not entirely) right about that, but I came away impressed with the man even as I disagreed with about half of what he thought.

Scott’s seat will come up for election again in 2014, he will serve till then and will likely run to keep the spot. Unusually, thanks to DeMint’s departure, both of South Carolina’s U.S. Senate seats will be contested then, as Lindsey Graham seeks re-election as well.

And Graham, a Republican not always beloved by the far right, may have a harder time getting his party’s nomination than Scott does.

It promises to be the usual South Carolina political circus, times two.

But for now I’m just happy that a good man got a good job, and knocked down a few barriers in the process.