COLUMBIA, S.C. — It's tough these days being from South Carolina. Ask Dick Harpootlian.
He was in Peru, on a train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, when he and his wife began chatting with another couple. Where, Harpootlian asked, are you from? Rio, came the response, and you? South Carolina, Harpootlian replied. Mark Sanford! the couple exclaimed. Argentina!
Later that night Harpootlian returned to his hotel room, flipped on the TV and picked out two words in a stream of Spanish: Joe Wilson. (As in, "You lie!")
"Thousands of miles from home," Harpootlian said with a sigh. "In the middle of nowhere."
Harpootlian is a prominent lawyer, former head of the state Democratic Party and a fierce partisan. Sanford and Wilson are Republicans.
But Harpootlian is hardly alone in his civic embarrassment.
"This is a small state that doesn't get on the national stage very often," said David Woodard, a GOP consultant who teaches political science at South Carolina's Clemson University. "To get on the stage because your congressman shouted at the president, or your governor is running around with an Argentine mistress, isn't what you want your state to be about."
It doesn't help that the state treasurer was sentenced to prison last year for cocaine possession.
Or that the state agriculture commissioner went to jail for ties to a cockfighting ring.
Or that the head of the state board of education resigned amid allegations she used a pseudonym to post erotic fiction on the Internet.
Quite a lively few years in South Carolina, mused Jack Bass, a historian at the Citadel in Charleston. "If you're thinking of retirement and you tend to get bored easily, come on down," Bass said. "You'll enjoy the place very much."
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"Gov. Mark Sanford said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. . . . He was really climbing Mt. Mistress." -- Craig Ferguson, "The Late Late Show"
So what is it about the place?
South Carolina has a long history of hotheadedness -- it was, after all, where the Civil War started. (In 1860, James L. Petigru, an attorney and Union loyalist, described South Carolina as "too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum," a line dredged up countless times since.)
