For S.C. Republicans, a convention offers a break of sorts

TAMPA – Ask South Carolina Republican delegates here why they feel it’s important that Mitt Romney win the presidency this fall, and expect a substantive and passionate response why President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve a second term.

Ask them about how the state’s top Republicans act toward one another inside their home state, and their responses will be briefer, or “off the record.”

The state’s Republican party was built by presidential politics, from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the then-controversial Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts to Republican President Richard Nixon’s subsequent “Southern strategy” to the state GOP’s prominent role in the party’s presidential primaries.

And it’s still national politics, such as this week’s Republican National Convention, that provides the glue that holds the state party together.

“It’s like a big family reunion,” said Glenn McCall, one of the state’s two National Republican Committee members. Some delegations even wear matching clothes, like extended families at a picnic.

“We may disagree on things,” McCall added, “but this is where we come together and unite on a state level.”

Read more in tomorrow’s Post and Courier.