Newsweek looks at historical South Carolina while Time looks at current South Carolina. Time excerpts:
By tradition, the nastiest onslaughts in South Carolina come from independent or anonymous third-parties, which can be run by supporters of rival candidates. Late last week, a new Arkansas group called "Victims Voice" made a small television buy here with an ad that effectively accused Huckabee of allowing the rape and murder of a young woman. The ad refers to the case of Wayne Dumond, a convicted Arkansas rapist who was paroled in 1997 and went on to murder Missouri native Carol Sue Shields in 2000. (As Arkansas governor, Huckabee announced that he supported Dumond's release from prison, believing him rehabilitated, though he denies pressuring the parole board to make the final decision to grant the release.)
Other attacks have become so common that they rarely make the news. For months, Republican activists in South Carolina have been bombarded with anonymous emails and mailers, many of which have taken aim at Romney's Mormon faith, which remains a concern among some of the state's evangelical voters. One mailer, delivered for the holidays, appeared to be a Mormon Christmas card. "We have now clearly shown that God the Father had a plurality of wives," the card read, before falsely claiming it had been sent by the "Romney family" and paid for by a Mormon temple in Boston. Dawson, of the state GOP, turned the mailer over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the hopes of a mail fraud investigation.
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