West Columbia visit delayed by protests in Charleston area
The campaign trail brought chaos and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to South Carolina Thursday, as the Minnesota congresswoman made appearances in Mt. Pleasant and West Columbia.
Bachmann had planned to speak aboard the USS Yorktown in Mt. Pleasant to praise veterans on the eve of Veteran’s Day and to outline her foreign policy platform.
But members of the Occupy Charleston protest had plans of their own.
“You capitalize on dividing Americans,” they shouted, interrupting Bachmann’s speech and repeating after one protester who read from a prepared statement, “claiming people that disagree with you are unpatriotic socialists.”
Seconds after the interruption, Bachmann was escorted off the stage; she returned after the demonstrators left.
The disruption appeared to delay the congresswoman’s Palmetto State schedule, which brought her — and a crowd of reporters — to a small and otherwise quiet Lizard’s Thicket restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Cayce.
After a campaign staffer alluded to a holdup in Charleston that pushed the day’s schedule back, one reporter, who had evidently not heard about the interruption, asked if traffic in the Lowcountry was the source of the delay.
“Yeah, it was something like that,” he responded, obviously miffed.
Once Bachmann did arrive at the restaurant, she seemed to have shaken off the afternoon’s disruption and quickly began shaking hands and engaging in small talk with patrons, most of whom were unaware of her plans to visit.
“I’m here to meet with people all across South Carolina,” she told reporters later in the evening. “They’ve been so sweet all day; people have been wonderful in terms of support.”
Though her conversations with patrons revolved mostly around the restaurant’s country-style fare — including chicken fried steak and the state’s distinctive mustard-based barbecue — instead of issues of public policy, Bachmann did address issues specifically related to South Carolina with reporters.
“One thing I want to do is bring those thousands of jobs to South Carolina for Boeing; that’d be very important,” she said. “There’s a big problem up at Savannah River Site to be able to deal with the nuclear waste; I want to deal with that. There’s a highway that needs to be built out at Myrtle Beach. There are a lot of things that have to be done.”
Bachmann’s supporters Thursday evening, however, were concerned about more broad, sweeping issues.
One elderly patron, a federal employee who asked not to be named, explained that the issue he was most concerned about was “to get (President Barack) Obama out of office,” he said.
“I have been grossly disappointed in everything Obama has done,” he added. “I see nothing positive in anything he has done in the last almost three years.”
Another, Marilyn Merrill, a native Minnesotan and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. employee, expressed her concerns about Obama, the economy and the possibility of attacks from Iran on Israel. Merrill said she was looking for “leadership in the other direction — getting jobs and not spending so much money, because we can’t get any more in debt.”
“I think [Bachmann] knows how it is going, and [Obama’s] got to be stopped. Somebody’s got to do it, and I hope she does it,” Merril said. “Socialism is not the direction to go; it really isn’t.”
Bachmann’s visit to the Palmetto State continues today as she attends Columbia’s Veteran’s Day parade and participates in a Republican debate on Saturday at Wofford College in Spartanburg.