vincent sheheen's campaign for minorities

For my political analysis project, I had originally planned to focus on Vincent Sheheen's campaign for SC governor. I still am but after talking in class, it became apparent that I could not cover his entire campaign. That's just too much, so I decided to focus specifically on his campaign aimed at minorities. I thought this would be an interesting angle as Sheheen is an Arab-American (fourth-generation Lebanese). Even more interestingly, his main opponent (the Republican candidate) is a minority too; Nikki Haley is an Indian-American.

In a first quick look-over of Sheheen's Web site, the only specific mention of minorities is under the "Issues" tab in the "Jobs and Economy" section,where he discusses focusing on minority-owned small businesses by creating a Division of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses in the SC government. I'll be trying to look for more details on this and other minority-related information on his Web site.

That said, Sheheen is at least getting a little publicity for being a minority himself. Here's a blog post I found on the Arab American Institute Web site profiling Sheheen and generally supporting his campaign.

And lastly, here's a post I found on Brad Warthen's blog about Sheheen's and Haley's views of the Confederate flag flying at the State House. I think his article is pretty interesting, and the comments are even more so. By the way, Warthen is a guy who used to work for The State newspaper and is now the director of communications/public relations for ADCO, an advertising and marketing agency in Columbia.

So the two articles I found are pretty heavily biased in favor of Sheheen but the Arab American Institute one is interesting because it's covered by a minority organization and Warthen's is interesting just to read the dialogue in the comments area. There are a lot of people who agree with him and a whole lot that don't. The comments really show the opinions of SC voters and how each person views the quotations differently.

So that's the preliminary search on Sheheen's campaign aimed at minorities and his coverage dealing with minorities. I've decided I'm going to have to dig deeper for some campaign information on minorities which is probably not a good thing. Hopefully I start to find some real campaign materials rather than just a bunch of videos and articles trashing Nikki Haley.