SOUTH CAROLINA RUNOFF TODAY – AT 6:53 A.M. ET:  History will probably be made in South Carolina today.  Nikki Haley, an Indian-American woman opposed by a sizable chunk of the good-'ol-boy Republican network, is poised to become the GOP nominee for governor, and is ahead in the polls for November.  From The Politico:

CONWAY, S.C. — Nikki Haley, the 38-year-old Indian-American political phenom who might be South Carolina’s next governor, downplays the two attributes that would make her different from her 115 predecessors.

When asked whether someone of her profile, the daughter of immigrants, could have been elected to statewide office when she was growing up here, she has a ready and artful answer.

“I think the timing is right, where people realize this is about issues,” Haley said in an interview. “It’s not about gender; it’s not about race.”

Yet the pink T-shirts some of her supporters wore Monday morning, a day before the Republican gubernatorial runoff, to a rally at a Main Street cafe here, tell a different story.

“If you want something said, ask a man,” read the Margaret Thatcher quote on the back of the “Haley for Governor” shirt. “If you want something done, ask a woman.”

The two messages may seem contradictory — avoiding explicit identity politics while harnessing the energy it has undoubtedly produced — but it’s precisely the finely calibrated mix that has vaulted the third-term Republican state representative and accountant to the verge of national political stardom.

And she's not the only news in South Carolina today:

And she isn’t alone this year: Tim Scott, another state representative, could become South Carolina’s first black Republican congressman since Reconstruction.

COMMENT:  The times they are a-changin', but not necessarily the way the other side would like them to change.  Nikki Haley is a far cry from Bella Abzug, the fire-breathing feminist congresswoman from New York in the 1960s.  And South Carolina is no longer the South Carolina of the Dixiecrats.  The South has risen again, and it's a south that, if Nikki Haley is elected, will have two Indian-American governors, the other being Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.  And both are Republicans.

Conservatism takes many forms.  One of the most creative is in the American South, which has shown that progress and patriotism go side by side.

June 22, 2010