Thinking Outside of the Box

Meet Alvin Greene, South Carolina Democratic primary "winner".

" I mean there's something that, you know, I knew so I just knew that. It was in my mind, I knew that, that, that, that the voters really, they really, that they really, erm, followed the candidate. That they really wanted substance in a candidate . . . "

[...]

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That's something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It's not something a typical person would bring up. That's something that could happen, that makes sense. It's not a joke."

[...]

Pundits have scrambled to explain how he pulled off his win. The voting machines must have been faulty; his name came before Rawl's on the ballot; the spelling of Greene is a black spelling that drew African-American voters; voters confused him with the singer Al Green.

  Guardian UK

Any one of those possibilities offers no better assessment of South Carolina's voters than the possibility that he actually is the winner of the state's primary, on the up-and-up.

Greene is the first black person to be taken on as a candidate for a US Senate seat in South Carolina since the days of reconstruction immediately after the civil war almost one and a half centuries ago.