‘It is time for change’: Jaime Harrison spreads message to Indian Land crowd
U.S. Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison stood at the front of the room and held back tears. Harrison, who is running to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, was speaking Wednesday to a crowd of about 200 Sun City Carolina Lakes residents.
He had just wrapped up his campaign speech and wanted to tell the group one last story. It was about his mom, who had to drop out of high school at 16 when she got pregnant with Harrison.
“One night, I’m in my office,” he starts the story. Harrison, the first African American chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, was working for House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn at the time in Washington D.C.
“It’s about midnight,” he continued. “And I’m sitting at my desk, and it’s so late that the custodial staff is starting to clean up.”
The crowd was silent.
A woman who worked for the custodial staff came into Harrison’s office, he said.
“She said, ‘You know, I clean your office every night. You have a really nice office,’” Harrison said. “I said, ‘Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate it.’ She said, ‘I love looking at all the pictures that you have on the walls.’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am you know, pictures of my family.’”
The woman noticed a picture of Harrison’s mom and picked up the frame, he said.
“She said, ‘Now, is this a picture of your mother?’” Harrison said. “I said, ‘Yes, ma’am. That’s my mom.’ She said, ‘Is her name Patricia?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
The crowd was still silent.
“And then, she stopped in the middle of the room,” Harrison continued. “And this different look came across her face. She put her hand to her mouth and she said, ‘Oh my God. I know your mom. I went to high school with your mom. I remember when your mom got pregnant and had to stop school to have you.”
Quiet gasps came from the crowd.
“And she comes up and she hugs me,” Harrison said. “She said, ‘I would have never thought that Patricia Harrison’s son would be right here. You give me hope.’”
Harrison’s voice cracked and he started to cry. The crowd clapped.
“This election is not about Donald Trump,” Harrison said. “It’s not about Lindsey Graham. It’s not about me. It’s about the thousands of kids, the thousands of parents, who each and every day pick up the newspaper, they turn on the TV and all they hear is hatred...and division, and as a result, they’ve lost all sense of hope.”
But Harrison told the crowd throughout the night that his campaign is about bringing back hope to the people of South Carolina.
‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’
Harrison, who raised a record $3.5 million in the last three months of 2019, said the average contribution to his campaign was $27 from 67,000 individual donors.
“This wasn’t from big, bad corporate PAC’s,” Harrison said. “It was from folks, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.”
He said the $3.5 million is more than any candidate has raised in a single quarter in South Carolina history.
“Part of that is because people are hungry for change,” he told the crowd. “You know that old quote — ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’ — that’s where people are right now.”
And Harrison said his campaign is focused on rebuilding trust between the people of South Carolina and state’s leaders.
“I started looking at the people that we have as leaders representing our great state,” Harrison said. “And I just said enough is enough. It is time for change.”
The crowd clapped.
‘WE’RE GOING TO HELP’
Harrison, who is from Orangeburg, said each county faces different challenges. He said Bamberg County struggles to provide care after its hospital shut down and he said nearly 31 percent of Berkeley County doesn’t have access to Wi-Fi. And he wants to address those issues for all counties.
“There’s so many issues and problems for people who go into work every day and they do what they can,” he said. “They pay their taxes. They do what they can to take care of their families, but they still are challenged. They still have hardships. They still have pains. I know what that feels like.”
So, Harrison said his campaign is about helping people and, as part of that, he started a program called Harrison Helps.
“There are places around here where there is no running water, where people are still going to outhouses,” he said. “We’ve got 41 communities here in South Carolina where the lead level is higher than the federal standards.”
He said with his program, he plans to provide resume-building and job interview workshops across the state, along with healthcare screenings for certain counties.
“People are hungry for somebody -- some leader that they can vote for who can come in, and say, ‘You know what? We’re going to help. We’re going to help,’” Harrison said. “But we don’t have that right now.”
‘FLIP OVER TO FOX NEWS’
At the end of his talk, Harrison told the crowd he had a wish.
“What I want is the day after the election — not the day of — the day after, I want all of y’all to get up,” he said. “Get your morning coffee. Get your newspapers. Get all cozy because you took the day off or you just decided to stay in. I want you to get up in the morning, turn on your TV’s and flip over to Fox News.”
The crowd laughed.
“Flip over to ‘Fox and Friends’ and there, on a couch, there will be Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson,” he said. “And there will be a box of handkerchiefs right there.”
He continued.
“You know they have the little magic ticker on the bottom,” he said. “You see on the ticker it says, ‘OMG Donald Trump is going back to Mar-a-Lago...and Lindsey Graham is carrying his bags.’”
The crowd stood up and clapped.
