Call him Dr. Olbermann D.D.S., because this interview with Alvin Greene is like pulling teeth!
The mysterious winner of the South Carolina Democratic Senate primary — an unemployed veteran who managed to win with no money and no visible evidence of a campaign who was recently discovered to have unusual methods of wooing women — went on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night and throughout the seven-minute segment refused to do anything that would give anyone the idea he was a normal candidate.
NewsFeed is unsure whether Greene’s success was due to a heretofore unobserved swelling of grassroots support for his campaign or, as Democratic leaders have suggested, an insidious Republican plot to plant awful candidates who would easily lose in the general elections. (South Carolina has an open primary system, where Republicans and Democrats can vote in each other’s primaries.) Whether it was through a refreshing lack of media training or simply the fact that he is a terrible candidate, Greene had the air of a man desperately trying not to mess things up too badly, giving one-word answers to most questions and generally acting like a character from a Werner Herzog film.
Olbermann, to his credit, handled the interview as well as he could, employing a suspicious-parent style of questioning that attempted to force Greene into describing specific things about his campaign. Greene did address rumors he was a Republican plant: “I’ve always been a Democrat and I still will be a Democrat in the future, and support Democrats.” Glad that’s settled.