Rachel Maddow had a great segment last night on the generally abysmal health status indicators for the great state of South Carolina.  What was best about the piece was its actual discussion of HEALTH (or lack of same) of a state's population, coupled with a question about whether the behavior of that state's political leadership is acting to improve or hinder their constituents' health status.  Rachel mentions the high rate of deadly strokes in South Carolina, which is a great opportunity to introduce this outstanding graphic North Carolina Stroke Care Collaborative.

Now, the point of this post is NOT to denigrate South Carolinians, Southerners in general, or people who suffer strokes.  The fact is that health status in this country is STUNNINGLY varied, with lots of communities facing health status challenges that would shock those of us living a comfortable 21st century life.  My own South Side of Chicago, of which I am a proud resident, has hopitalization rates for people in the prime of their lives that are twice those of Illinois in general.  Before you ask, those excess hospitalizations are NOT all for gunshot violence; instead, my neighbors are hospitalized for conditions like ashtma, heart failure and high blood pressure -- conditions that we are fully capable of managing WITHOUT hospitalization, but don't manage for large segments of the populace.  Rather, this post, like Ms. Maddow's segment, is to ask whether South Carolina's political leadership considers the state's relative poor health when doing things like opposing stimulus funding or health care reform.

Now, it's easy to argue that Joe Wilson, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford do care about the poor health of their constituents, but it's more important for them personally to score political points by opposing ANY effort by the Obama administration and the Congress to help South Carolina.  You can argue these guys can have the best of both worlds:  personally oppose things like health care reform to win cred with the Base, while knowing the legislation will pass and benefit their state regardless.  But even that hypothesis begs the question -- why does it please their Base to oppose beneficial legislation?  How do these guys rationalize doing and saying things that seem so detrimental to their constituents?

I'm not an expert on South Carolina nor a psychologist, but I grew up in the South and I now live in a community fraught with highly charged issues of race and poverty.  As in a previous post, I would say the behaviors of South Carolina pols and the Base to whom they pander reflect the old attitudes about race and poverty:  that poverty and low social standing are ordained from on high and/or a reflection of poor moral character.  In this worldview, wealth is a sign of virtue, not good fortune, and poverty is a sign of laziness and moral failing. 

Adding in race makes it even easier to exploit South Carolina's challenges for politcal gain.  The Nixon/Reagan Southern Strategy successfully pitted insecure whites against non-white groups.  The clear message of that stategy?  The government is going to take what little you have (jobs, health insurance) away from you and give it to the dark-skinned people who voted for the Democrats.  We continue to see EXACTLY that mentality among the Teabaggers, who are not a generally affluent bunch and express very clear fears that they shouldn't pay for lazy black people's health insurance.  The reality, of course, is that it's the wealthy elite that should and could help pay for the health insurance.  But the time-honored Southern Strategy divides and conquers the least well-off in our society in order to maintain the political and economic power of a small elite. 

It's hard not to view Sanford, Wilson, Graham and DeMint as the wealthy elite of a still-impoverished state, pitting it's vulnerable populations against each other to maintain their priveleged status.  In their worldview, South Carolina's poor health status is not a bug, but a feature, a feature demonstating the divine natural order of things, a feature that above all else enables them to preserve their positions of privelege and influence.