Tim Scott weighs making a 2024 run
CHARLESTON, S.C. >> Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, openly eyeing a pathbreaking run for the Republican presidential nomination, came home Thursday night to the city that started the Civil War to test out themes of unity and forgiveness aimed at the current war in his party — and the divisions roiling the nation at large.
The ultimate question is whether Republican voters who embraced former President Donald Trump's brand of us-versus-them divisiveness are ready for the themes that Scott is selling.
His speech to the Charleston County Republican Party could have been the kind of routine dinner address that all elected officials give, this one honoring Black History Month at a local college. But the television crews and reporters piled onto the risers at The Citadel military college's alumni center were there to watch what amounted to a soft opening for a White House run by Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate. And it came only a day after a festive kickoff event for the presidential campaign of Scott's friend, political benefactor and fellow South Carolinian, Nikki Haley.
“If you want to understand America, you need to start in Charleston; you need to understand and appreciate the devastation brought upon African Americans,” Scott counseled. “But if you stop at our original sin, you have not started the story of America, because the story of America is not defined by our original sin. The story of America is defined by our redemption.”
Scott has obvious political assets to bring to a potentially crowded field: a message of optimism, a disposition that has made him personally popular even with his political opponents and the historic nature of his potential nomination.
But those assets could prove to be a liability in today's Republican primary environment, where voters rail against what they see as unfair favoritism toward people of color and where activists may be more interested in anger than optimism.
Scott appears to understand that race is a major political issue at this fraught moment when the loudest voices in his party are disputing how Black history is taught, race consciousness and the once widely accepted notion that diversity should be a goal, not just happenstance. His own Senate record includes legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime and a major push for police reforms in the wake of George Floyd's murder.
So Scott has been approaching the issue from both sides, acknowledging the racism that confined his grandparents to the impoverished corners of the Jim Crow South and that still sends him routinely to the shoulders of the road for traffic stops. But he also says, invariably with a smile, that the nation is not racist.
“There is a way for us to unify this country around basic principles that lead us forward and not backward, but we have to quit buying the lie that this is the worst time in American history,” he said Thursday. “Only if American history started today can that be true.”