Tim Scott’s ‘Land of Opportunity’ The Senator’s optimistic conservatism may stand out in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.
One regrettable reality of today’s politics is that a left-right condominium is preaching that America is a failed experiment. All the more reason to welcome GOP Sen. Tim Scott as a presidential candidate running on better days ahead and a “new American sunrise.” The question is whether he can refine his aspirational politics into a credible agenda for national renewal.
“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression,” the 57-year-old from South Carolina said in a three-minute video released this week. “I know it because I’ve lived it.” Mr. Scott was raised by a single mother in poverty. “I was that hopeless kid in America,” he said in a 2020 speech.
But he graduated from college and started his own business, and he credits his success in large part to the support of his Christian mother and a local Chick-fil-A franchisee who took an interest in him. Many voters will see the better angels of America’s nature in this story.
Mr. Scott has been a Senator for a decade, which isn’t an asset in an era when most of the country dislikes Washington. But he has been largely a constructive force, as Senators go. He helped build the GOP coalition for tax reform in 2017, and he rightly says the Tax Cut and Jobs Act built “the most inclusive economy” in recent U.S. memory, with record low unemployment for black and Hispanic Americans.
The South Carolinian also tried to mediate a bipartisan coalition for police reform, which fell apart amid Democratic demands. He’s an articulate evangelist for school choice, a message he has carried around the country.
The GOP is better for having a U.S. Senator who can speak cogently on race in America. Worth revisiting is Mr. Scott’s 2016 speech about being pulled over seven times in a year while driving. He describes how his brother, a sergeant major in the Army, was stopped because a cop assumed his Volvo might be stolen.
Mr. Scott’s book last year, “America, a Redemption Story,” captures his politics of hard work and opportunity, but it can also read at times like a self-help book. It is heavy on exclamation points and light on policy, and at one point Mr. Scott says it can take new staffers time to realize he doesn’t “actually love politics or policy.”
Mr. Scott’s video announcement this week nods that he’ll “stand up to China,” but he’ll have to explain how he’ll rebuild America’s military deterrent and curb China’s economic influence without veering into self-defeating industrial subsidies. In other words, he’ll need a policy. Ditto for taxes, healthcare, immigration, trade, energy.
One major asset is that Mr. Scott is impossible to dislike, a sharp contrast with most of today’s angry politicians. He’ll try to sell GOP audiences that you can fight for conservative ideas with civility, a theme that former Vice President Mike Pence may also strike if he runs.
As Mr. Scott put it in his excellent response to President Biden’s 2021 State of the Union address: Mr. Biden promised to “unite a nation” and “lower the temperature,” but instead has delivered more division. We’ll see if GOP primary voters want a respite from rancor.
Mr. Scott is a powerful fundraiser, but he has never had a tough Senate race and his political skills have never been tested on the national stage. If he can make it through the GOP primaries, he could be formidable in a general election as the candidate of national revival for a country that sorely needs it.
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