HOW DO YOU POLITELY SAY ‘NOT A CHANCE IN HELL’?

If I ever get a job as a South Carolina employment commissioner where I can make nearly $200k per year for doing absolutely nothing, then I think I will buy The State’s editorial page editor Brad Warthen a tripod for his camera. He gets all of these great people to come talk to him, and he asks good questions, but he never uses a tripod. It makes his interviews like watching the Blair Witch Project if the Blair Witch Project had a plot and was about Palmetto State politics.

But the clip he posted today — motion sickness aside — was quite good. It featured Sen. Lindsey Graham essentially shutting the door on media-perpetuated rumors that Gov. Mark Sanford will be GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate. Of course, this isn’t news to The Palmetto Scoop readers, because I wrote two months ago (and at least 598,378 times since) that Sanford missed the boat.

In Warthen’s clip, Political Reporter John O’Connor asked Graham if Sanford is a serious contender in the veepstakes. Graham’s response was positive, and he only said good things about the governor, but it was basically a very diplomatic way of saying “not a chance in hell.”

Graham did however hit on something that, as Warthen noted in his post, “drew a contrast between the two of them.”

He said he was backing Republicans, regardless of whether he agreed with them totally or not, because “I’m a party leader.” Which of course suggests that certain other people are not, but he wasn’t going to say so. [BRAD WARTHEN - The State]

On Tuesday, Graham’s re-election campaign announced that the senator was backing all of the state’s Republican incumbents. That is completely at odds with what Sanford is doing by putting out hits on sitting GOP legislators. So we’ll see if this becomes an issue.