@TravisPriceSC
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FINAL SCORE🏈
Class 1A Division 1:
Andrews - 7
Marion - 33
#FullCoverageScoreboard brought to you by @scfbinsView quoted post on X
Final: @BlueFlameFB 56, Walhalla 8. For the first time in 20 years, Pickens has won a playoff football game. Blue Flame will head to Daniel next week in round 2.View quoted post on X
I’ve been thinking a lot about Darline Graham and the what an odyssey she’s been living since July. I didn’t think about all this from her perspective while she was running because there was too much at stake and I strongly believed she was allowing herself to be manipulated into a way of talking and believing that didn’t seem authentic to who she truly was. I don’t know her. Never met her. But I knew Lindsey Graham adored his sister - and it stands to reason that if he had believed she was cut out for politics, he probably would have encouraged her to run for something. On the other hand, not being “cut out for politics” is a beautiful thing. While we need people willing to run for office, among those “not cut out” for it, we see some of the kindest, calmest, most mild mannered people we want as our friends and neighbors. Darline Graham struck me as one such “mild-mannered person” before she ran. But something happens to many of us when we enter the political zone as a candidate. I call it “drinking your own bathwater.” If you’re not careful, it’s easy to start believing you are as great and divinely-chosen as your campaign claims you are. If you don’t know what to look out for, you might be flattered into believing the most extreme messaging of your own hype. In a world where we don’t typically say encouraging things to each other, it’s so tempting to believe every good thing you hear about yourself. And, just like a drug dealer, the flatterers who get you addicted can then manipulate you into doing things that don’t fit who you are. And addicts will do whatever it takes to get the next fix. When Darline Graham was berating former Special Counsel Jack Smith in the Senate hearing, and when she was reading cuss words from a script to insult Annie Andrews, it seemed clear that she was not being her true self. But when she admitted in the primary debate that foreign policy is just “not [her] thing,” she was. When she said last week that she would “choke Lindsey” when she got to heaven for making her do this, she was absolutely being her true self. And I sensed that this was a turning point. It may have marked the moment when she finally saw through the flatterers and decided she would no longer be manipulated. When you become your party’s nominee, it’s like you get on a train that you are powerless to stop until it reaches its destination. Still, she seemed to check out in the final weeks and it felt like established SC Republicans were trying their best to carry her across the finish line like Weekend at Bernie’s as she increasingly seemed to want to just stop and go home. And her seeming defiance and refusal to engage in the final weeks was relatable, even admirable, in a way that her early actions were not. Unfortunately for the people who convinced her to run, it was not consistent with her winning. I wonder what she thinks today about the last four months of her life. I wonder if she feels like she was manipulated in her time of grief. I wonder if she feels like this was a lesson in shunning the flatterers and exercising more agency in her life. I think it’s safe to say she’s out of politics now, and I’ll probably never know the true story of her journey. But I’m fascinated by what I imagine it was.View quoted post on X
