Alvin Greene: The Forrest Gump of American politics

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last updated 8 January 2015

Americans have spent weeks trying to figure out Alvin Greene, says Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. An unemployed veteran nobody had heard of, Greene entered South Carolina's Democratic senate primary with "no campaign, no ads, no yard signs," yet defeated a well-known former state representative. Who is this "remote, expressionless man"? A real-life version of Forrest Gump and other fictional nobodies who become somebodies:

If Greene were to defeat incumbent Jim DeMint — and stranger things routinely happen in the Palmetto State — Republicans would have to be gracious as one of their favorite tropes became manifest. That would be William F. Buckley's famous statement, beloved by conservatives, that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.