The South Carolina gubernatorial campaign does not rate among the more competitive in the country. It won’t be found on any “Races to Watch” lists, and most national observers would be hard-pressed to offer up anything about Gov. Mark Sanford’s (R.) challenger other than his name — if they can do even that.

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But while state Sen. Tommy Moore (D.) is no Eliot Spitzer, his battle with Sanford, and Sanford’s battle with his own party, could have more implications for the 2008 presidential contest than any other statehouse race in the nation this side of Des Moines.

Moore is a political veteran, as Sanford’s camp delights in pointing out, who for a generation has represented a district centered on conservative Aiken County, just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga. And although the other most distinguished figures to emerge from this politically fertile region of South Carolina (most notably a fella named Strom Thurmond) also spent most of their adult lives in government, Sanford and his allies have sought to portray Moore as just another career politician. A “Columbia Insider,” as they put it, who has been trading favors and slapping backs with the other good ole boys in the Capitol since 1979.

Implied but unsaid is that Sanford is not such a southern pol. And he is not. Born and raised in Fort. Lauderdale, Marshall Clement Sanford Jr.’s ties to the state originate with summers spent on his wealthy family’s sprawling Lowcountry farm (or, as his opponents would have it, “plantation”) near the coast. He later went to a fancy business school. He also spent years on Wall Street.

Then there is what South Carolinians politely describe as his “eccentric” personality.

“He’s got not one ounce of hail fellow well met in him,” observed Francis Marion University professor and longtime South Carolina GOP activist Neal Thigpen.

Sanford has been known to show up for speeches only to sit in the audience, keeping to himself until it is his turn to speak. And when he does, he’ll lace his speeches with obscure references to whatever it is he just happened to be reading about. Thigpen recalls a time he delved into an examination of the Korean War in an address to a group of farmers and businessmen in Florence, S.C.

Meet the Family
Perhaps most importantly, Sanford is married to a brassy Chicagoan who has not spent her time baking cookies and hosting teas, but running her husband’s campaigns. It has been this way since 1994 when Sanford came virtually out of nowhere to win a Charleston-area House seat with Jenny Sanford at the helm. The Georgetown graduate, former Lazard Freres investment banker, and mother of four was also instrumental eight years later when her husband, having stuck to his pledge to serve only three terms in Congress, successfully ran for governor.

Indeed, when Gov.-elect Sanford announced after his victory in 2002 that Jenny would serve on his transition team, the always-ready-with-a-quip chairman of the South Carolina Democrats said out loud what was being whispered by many.

Jenny Sanford and Hillary Clinton “have much in common,” Dick Harpootlian said. “Both grew up in the upscale mostly white suburbs north of Chicago. Both are perhaps better educated than their husbands...And both have a real love for political battle.”

Clearly Mark Sanford, Harpootlian mischievously concluded, “agrees with what President Clinton said at the time conservatives were criticizing his wife’s role in government — ‘you get two for the price of one.’”

Now, four years later, the Hillary chatter is back. But this time it comes not from the sour grapes of the state’s weakened Democratic Party, but rather from a core group of activists who make up what remains of the South Carolina GOP establishment.

The Outsider
For all the above reasons and more, these individuals have never really trusted Sanford. A maverick in Congress, Sanford resembled his Class of ‘94 classmates more than Thurmond and the other old-line southerners. Instead of greasing spending bills for his district, the libertarian-leaning Sanford spent his time in D.C. (or at least the three days a week he was there) decrying taxes and deficit spending. He was against earmarks before it was cool.

If the spectacle of a millionaire congressman crashing on a futon for six years instead of renting a place in the nation’s capital did not cement his reputation for being a little bit different, Sanford’s endorsement of Sen. John McCain for president in 2000 did.

More important for South Carolina (and the 2008 White House sweepstakes), the McCain-Sanford coupling in 2000 presaged the 2002 gubernatorial race. In a proxy battle between the McCain and Bush forces in the state, Sanford was pitted in the GOP run-off against Upstate Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler (R.). Sanford won the nomination with ease and dispatched incumbent Gov. Jim Hodges (D.) that fall.

“He talked about creating a new South Carolina, and that appealed to voters,” observed University of South Carolina Professor Blease Graham. “But he’s a change agent, and both Republicans and Democrats resist change in South Carolina.”

What appealed to voters, Graham noted, “didn’t necessarily appeal to legislators”

Wary from the start of the new governor of South Carolina — the first in decades who had not come from their ranks — those legislators have clashed with Sanford for most of the past three and a half years. While toned down at times, or at least swept under the carpet, the feud is now out in the open as Sanford and leaders in the GOP-controlled House and Senate trade increasingly pointed and very much public insults.

When the governor’s gadfly of a primary opponent visited the legislature earlier this year, the Democratic caucus sat with delighted bemusement as their GOP counterparts gave country doctor Oscar Lovelace (R.) a standing ovation.

And on the Sunday before Sanford faced Lovelace in the primary in June, the Republican Speaker of the House took to the op-ed page of two of the state’s largest and most politically influential papers to suggest the governor read up on his Dale Carnegie, and, in an allusion to the former iconic Republican governor, that Mark Sanford is no Carroll Campbell.

Sanford loyalists attribute such carping to bruised egos and curbs on prized legislative pork. They say few Republicans beyond the confines of the statehouse bear any ill will towards their governor. Sanford himself says that such clashes just “go with the territory.”

“That’s the notion of leadership. It’s staking out positions, some of which that may be less than immediately popular, and saying this is the direction that we ought to go,” he told the AP in June.

Such comments inflame his opponents, but it may not matter.

Sanford’s Advantages and his Exasperated Opponents
Despite Lovelace’s eyebrow-raising 35 percent in the primary, most observers give Moore little chance against Sanford. His hopes could have been have been dashed when GOP state Sen. and avowed Sanford hater Jake Knotts decided against running as an Independent despite claiming to have collected enough petitions to get his name on the ballot.

Without Knotts, the question is if there are enough disaffected Republicans willing to support a Democrat. His losing a not-insignificant chunk of votes to the severely underfunded Lovelace withstanding, Sanford remains popular with many in the grassroots of the party. He also has the political benefit of a Lowcountry base in a state where anybody with an “R” after his name is all but a lock for 50+ percent in the heavily conservative Greenville-Spartanburg upcountry region that is home to Bob Jones University and the new head of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Above all, Sanford can tap into a warchest that was around $4.2 million at the start of July. (those Florida, Wall Street, and Chicago ties do have their political upside). Moore spent thousands on a self-financed primary opponent and has little left in the bank and no personal money (or out-of-state friends) to tap into.

It is what Lovelace and Knotts represent, however, that may be less threatening to Sanford than promising to one ‘08 candidate. They embody the fed-up wing of the South Carolina GOP; Annoyed by Sanford’s refusal to schmooze and play the game in Columbia; offended by his carrying squealing and defecating piglets into the Capitol — their Capitol — to send a message about pork-barreling; and irked by his wife’s continued role in state government (after Sanford’s first chief of staff left, Jenny Sanford took on a more formal position in the Capitol and helped craft the state budget).

It is this last part that especially rankles: Jenny Sanford’s insistence on using her position not to promote literacy or tourism, but to offer substantive input on the day-to-day governing of South Carolina — and on her husband’s politics.

As one senior aide to a South Carolina Republican simply put it, “She’s seen as the governor.”

When Gov. Sanford visited troops in Iraq in June, the first lady sent out a mass-e-mail announcing her independent support for a Lt. Gov. candidate in the GOP runoff. Support, that is, for the candidate challenging the incumbent GOP Lt. Gov. When the incumbent, Andre Bauer, won a convincing victory in the run-off, many analysts concluded that Mrs. Sanford’s endorsement backfired. That somebody at Bauer’s victory party bellowed, “Thank you, Jenny!” during the festivities would seem to validate this opinion.

Delivering S.C.
Given this standing with the state’s most influential Republicans, an endorsement from a second-term Sanford would not necessarily carry significant muscle for any presidential contender. Though he has ruled out the possibility of a White House bid of his own, Sanford has remained pointedly quiet about whom he favors for the nomination. He is expected to get behind McCain, but has not done so in the early and vocal fashion of his old House colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.), who has his own problems with the base. A cynic might say that by not supporting McCain again, he would actually be doing his fellow maverick a favor. (Although McCain has recently picked up a few early endorsements from some prominent South Carolina Republicans, many party regulars in the state still regard with him with deep suspicion; Byron York’s recent piece for NR explains nicely McCain’s cool relations with South Carolina.) Whether he endorses McCain for a second time or not, the Arizonan has the most to gain with four more years of Mark Sanford in Columbia.

Since 1980, no Republican presidential candidate has won the nomination without winning the South Carolina primary. And in every contested nomination battle since that time, the man who delivered those winning Republican votes was Carroll Campbell. A Greenville-area Congressman in 1980, Campbell and his young protégé Lee Atwater spurned Strom Thurmond’s preferred candidate to run Ronald Reagan’s South Carolina campaign. Eight years later, as governor, he and Atwater engineered the Palmetto State effort for Reagan’s vice-president, securing a victory for George H. W. Bush over Bob Dole (again, Thurmond’s preferred candidate). When Bush was challenged from the right by Pat Buchanan in 1992, the Campbell organization was there again. Facing another Buchanan insurgency four years later, Campbell, by this point a Washington insurance lobbyist, patched things up with Dole to deliver another much-needed primary victory — a win so impressive as to get Campbell on Dole’s vice-presidential short list.

In 2000 there was little doubt whom Campbell and his friends would get behind. The Campbells and the Bushs were like family. And once again, he came through with a must-have victory, stopping the bleeding from another Bush loss in New Hampshire.

A year later, the architect of the modern South Carolina Republican party was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 61. He died of a heart attack last December.

Without Campbell, there is no unified political operation ready to get behind a favored Republican. John McCain can’t be taken out if there is a) no George W. Bush to do the taking out and b) no ready apparatus to crush the insurgency. Whether there will be one of the former – a consensus establishment candidate with backing from both the country club donor wing and evangelical activist wing of the party — is an open question. But nothing resembling the latter exists today within the South Carolina Republican party, say observers there.

“The party is sort of leaderless. …There’s no big gun,” said Thigpen, the professor and a McCain supporter.

“Campbell would get in and break your bones, but he’d also go to the mat for ya. But now there’s nobody, and that’s the question [about the primary].”

There can be no establishment candidate if there is no establishment. With Campbell gone and the Sanfords reigning, will 2008 be the year the South Carolina firewall is breached?

— Jonathan Martin is a staff writer for National Journal’s “The Hotline.”