On Tuesday, our class was honored to tour the historic governor's mansion. The photo to the left shows the piano with sheet music to "Tell Me the Old, Old Story," a very fitting song for its viewers. The governor's mansion has been housing the chief executives of South Carolina since 1868.   Pictured to the right is me in the library, which houses an extensive collection of history and practices pertinent to each county of South Carolina. 

 

I visited the GOP headquarters in Columbia, South Carolina today and had the opportunity to speak with Executive Director Hope Walker. She was very informative and shared a detailed breakdown of the various chairs and the important work they are doing within the organization. It was a great and insightful visit overall. 

     Yesterday, Meg Kinnard came to introduce herself and share with us her experience within the journalism field. I found her completely inspiring, and her story resonated deeply with me. Specifically her akiness to objectivity. She said, "If you get to the end of one of my stories and feel you know my side, I've done a bad job". She also spoke of her background and origins in politics, which began at a young age supporting her uncle on his campaign trail. Her grandfather was a blue dog conservative representative of Tenessee, Ed Jones. I later had the pleasure of meeting Jay Parmley, the executive director at the SCDP(South Carolina Democratic Party). It alludes to how the topic of the conversation came about, but we got to talking about blue-dog Democrats. A term I never really had a name for before this trip. It essentially refers to Democrats with conservative tendencies. They've also been described as a more moderate Democrat or a fiscally responsible Democrat...

I'm working on the Nikki Haley campaign alongside another cohort in a program of 24 students. There's something both profound and exhilarating in rooting for the underdog. My biases in wanting a woman of color to be in the most pertinent position of power trumps her faulty policy. Still, a presidential candidate must stand on a platform well-rounded enough to encompass all my preferences. Yesterday, in a contemporary political theory lecture, we discussed Gurri's Revolt of the Public and his solution to the fifth wave. It is a complete transparency to a governmental conversation with pertinent security detrimental information being permissible to be discussed without being relayed to the public. Some students argued that it would cause a detriment to an already complex information climate. Professor Walker, Ph.D., raised the point that grand forms of community existed in a generation older than my own. Communities centered around the church, the outdoors, and the communitie...