Republican Michele Bachmann, who is elected by real people to Congress from someplace called Minnesota, wants - badly apparently - to be president.
So she is coming to Rock Hill Friday to say so. Who knows what else she might say.
You should go see Bachmann - at $20 a head - no matter your political leanings, says a retired Army lieutenant colonel named Charlie Funderburke, one of the toughest conservatives and nicest guys in Rock Hill.
Funderburke, who grew up in an orphanage but has advanced college degrees and spent a lifetime in the military, respects Bachmann's being a foster parent.
He has an accounting background, so he knows that government should have the money it wants to spend and not borrow trillions. He said he has seen Bachmann on TV, agrees with some of her politics and her tea party stuff, and would like to meet her.
"If she is coming here, and people have a chance to see what she is all about, they should do it if they can get there," said Funderburke. "I'm a conservative. This is a conservative area.
"I don't agree with everything any candidate says - her included - but if she wants the big job of the Republican Party, and that means conservatives around here would be the ones electing her, she has to say what she will do."
OK, so Bachmann told an audience not long ago that we should get back to the principles of the FounDing Fathers - who helped abolish slavery.
Maybe she just didn't get to the part of the original documents of our country that made slaves property, and counted them as only three-fifths of a person for census purposes.
Or maybe she forgot for a minute the war that ended slavery came almost a century later - at the cost of 700,000 soldiers dead and uncountable millions of slaves dead.
So it is easy for liberals to giggle at the expense of the first potential presidential candidate expected to visit York County this year.
Bachmann is an easy target because she is a testament to what the late great John Justice, Democratic prosecutor for Chester and Lancaster counties, said of former Gov. Jim Hodges of Lancaster, who is also a Democrat.
"There is an old saying that anybody can get elected," Justice told a crowd. "Hodges, you just proved that."
But if Bachmann wants to be president, she will be president of all of us, however, not just the conservatives. Even the poor and unemployed - around here almost one in every five people.
If you are poor and don't have $20, maybe you should go stand outside the Baxter Hood Center and hope Bachmann says hello on the way in or out.
If it were a Democrat seeking the presidency - President Barack Obama maybe - walking across the parking lot of the Baxter Hood Center, you could ask about the cost of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq he vowed as a candidate to end.
Wars that cost trillions of dollars and so many lives, and continue to help make worse this huge budget deficit we hear about every day from people such as Bachmann.
You could ask Bachmann that, too.
Bachmann is one of the tea party people, whose events I have covered in Rock Hill and Lancaster. Whether Bachmann is a viable candidate to anybody besides far-right conservatives is up to voters such as Funderburke.
But so many of the local tea partiers are genuinely concerned, decent conservative people of regular means who raise legitimate questions of politicians of either party. Mainly: "Who is gonna pay for all this?"
Then some of those same people call Obama a socialist - after many of them collect their socialist Social Security checks and their socialist Medicare benefits.
Yet liberals who just say that Bachmann has nothing important to say have trouble with math.
John Spratt was in Congress for 28 years. Even by the account of his opponent last year during debates, tea party Republican Mick Mulvaney, Spratt did a terrific job most of that time as a moderate Democrat.
Yet Spratt could not say how federal health care would get paid for last year because nobody could say the costs with a straight face - and he was crushed in the last election.
Bachmann has not offered any alternatives, either, for these deficits or anything else.
She hates "Obamacare," but what is she for? Will she use the term "free markets" with a straight face to the poor and unemployed whose textile mill jobs went overseas? You have the chance to go find out inside the Baxter Hood Center.
Bachmann's visit is another reason living in our area of South Carolina is so much better than living a few miles away in North Carolina.
People who want to be president just about have to come here at least a time or two, because South Carolina has the first Southern primary.
Charlotte gets Democrats for their national convention in September 2012. They get coverage of whether there are enough hotels in Charlotte, enough soft cheese for cocktail parties or if the barbecue is authentic.
They get whining by their cheering media that people don't know Charlotte is not a cow town - and then the next day they brag to everybody they know that Billy Graham grew up around there on a dairy farm filled with cows that gave real milk.
We in York County get the real deal, chances to see all the Republican candidates for the 2012 nominating cycle, until the GOP primary early next year. You get answers - if you ask questions.
In 2008, we had "Fred Thompson Day" in York, decreed by the mayor of York, and Thompson himself speaking about conservatism at the Rock Hill Golden Corral restaurant.
Thompson, like Bachmann now, was positioned in the horse race post as the most conservative of all the conservatives running.
Thompson ran so far in the back of the pack in the 2008 primary he should have had casts on his legs. Hours after the South Carolina primary he wasn't even a memory.
South Carolina doesn't just get the candidates, our primary crushes the dreams of the ones who lose.
But at least you get to hear it for yourself, if you want. Here, you do not need cable news or talk radio to tell you what to think.
You can be like Charlie Funderburke, go yourself and listen to candidates, then vote for who you think is best.
If you are not broke - and have $20 to spare.
