Lindsey Graham’s Tea Party Opponents Are Emerging

Try as he might to stamp out a primary challenge, it looks like GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Princess, may have to deal with a Tea Party challenge.  To be candid, I despise Graham, but compared to his possible Tea Party opponents he looks rational.  Rational, of course, in the context of today's GOP is a very relative term.  The Daily Beast looks at Graham's possible challengers.  Here are excerpts:

According to sources in South Carolina and within the Tea Party, at least two serious challenges to Graham are expected to emerge in the next few weeks. Dustin Stockton, a leading conservative activist and head of Western PAC, told The Daily Beast that he is headed to South Carolina next month to help build a ground game for the 2014 primary.

Knocking off Graham, said Stockton, who helped defeat establishment candidates in Alaska and Nevada in 2010, was this year’s top Tea Party priority.

“The Lindsey Graham wing of the party,” he said, stands for “saying one thing and doing another, creating backroom deals, getting elected, and not doing anything.”

Richard Cash, a businessman and former South Carolina congressional candidate, announced his candidacy in April.

But Tea Party types are looking to coalesce around either Lee Bright, a Spartanburg state senator, or Nancy Mace, a public-relations executive.

Bright told The Daily Beast that he is looking to make an announcement in the coming weeks.

“My voting record in the state Senate is very similar to what Jim DeMint did in the U.S. Senate,” he said, referring to the hard-right former senator who resigned this year to lead the Heritage Foundation. “It is more of a match with conservative values in South Carolina. I just don’t think Graham is in touch with the people of South Carolina. He is more enamored of the national media than he is doing what South Carolinians would like to see him do.”

“Every election, at the state level, the county level, the precinct level, you find a bunch of people who talk about ousting Lindsey Graham,” said Hogan Gidley, a strategist and a former executive director of the state’s Republican Party. “But then they start watching TV ads, and more about his record comes out, and they say, ‘Wait a minute. This guy is more conservative than I thought.’

For his part, Bright has been pushing his conservative bona fides. He’s introduced a number of bills in the state Senate that will be red meat to GOP primary voters. One abortion bill would regulate abortion clinics in the same way that similar bills in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Texas have done. Another, dubbed Constitutional Carry, would eliminate any special permitting for gun owners.

“If you own a weapon, you should be able to carry your weapon,” he said.

Graham, he said, “is a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and is not very concerned about our Fourth Amendment rights.

The craziness will be entertaining to watch and every dollar spent on primary infighting will be a dollar less for the general election.