Nancy Mace Interview | Faith & Freedom

GREENVILLE, S.C. | JOSHUA COOK | JUNE 21, 2013 |

Earlier this week I met up with Nancy Mace to ask her a few questions about faith, freedom and a possible run for US Senate.

Greenville Post: “Looking over the last couple of years in South Carolina politics we elected our first female Governor, Nikki Haley. We also elected Sen. Katrina Shealy, who is our only female in the State Senate right now who had to go through a lot as a petition candidate to win the election. Another historic event was Sen. Tim Scott, our first African-American Senator who was appointed by Gov. Haley. If you decide to run for the US senate seat and win, what would it mean for South Carolinians to have their first female US Senator?”

Mace: “Well I would say that I would hope that people would elect the right person for the job regardless of race or gender. That’s really important to me. I’m not a feminist, but it’s great to see examples of folks who are out there who can roll up their sleeves and do the job that they were elected to do regardless of all that.”

“It’s great that South Carolina can set an example. I think that’s awesome. South Carolina might have the opportunity to do that, but I don’t think you vote for someone or elect them because of their gender or their race. It needs to be more or less what their belief system is.”

Greenville Post: “Nancy, can you tell me about your faith?”

Mace: “Sure, I’m Christian, and I don’t talk about it a lot in my speech. I’ll talk about it a little tonight, but there is a Citadel man in my life that I believe was sent through God to help save me in my life. I had a lot of failings growing up. My mother always said to me it’s not a mistake if you learn from it, and I did a lot of learning. When I was 18 I found my religious views. I really found those at that time in my life where I had gone through a lot of difficulty. I looked to God to help me figure things out. That was really important to me. So I think faith is important; to anybody, if you’re going through anything, your faith is important to you.”

Greenville Post: “A lot of people have been talking about the article you wrote in Redstate.com; there were different reactions, but people in the upstate loved it; I got a lot of feedback and they really liked it because sometimes they feel like they don’t have a voice. One of the comments you made in the article criticized Sen. Lindsey Graham’s recent statement.”

“I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to the terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So we don’t have anything to worry about.”

“What are your views on that statement?”

MACE: “I get concerned about the NSA revelations that we’ve heard about in the last couple of weeks in the Obama administration. We’ve had IRS scandals, IRS targeting conservative groups, and we’ve had the Department of Justice seizing the phone records and emails of reporters without a warrant. We’ve had Benghazi. We didn’t get to the bottom of Benghazi, but Susan Rice received a promotion, and Hillary Clinton received a pass for Libya. Then we had Jim Clapper who testified before congress and said: “They weren’t collecting data from law abiding citizens” only to find out moments later that they were.

“I get concerned about the potential hacking and misuse of that information. I have more questions than I have answers, but I get concerned about the fourth amendment and the rights of law abiding citizens. I think that most people do. And we have all of these resources. Radical Islam is the number one threat to US security, and we should be targeting them. I just feel like as an American citizen we should be targeting terrorists. If Boston has taught us anything, it is that we dropped the ball because we were warned about those individuals from another country. I get concerned when I hear that they are collecting all this information, and I get even more concerned about the misuse of that information…Radical Islam is our number one threat, but what are we doing to target those folks? And so, that just concerns me…I think it concerns most people too.”

Greenville Post: “If you do decide to run, Lindsey Graham has a political machine and has millions of dollars in his war chest. What’s your strategy for getting your message out along with fundraising?”

MACE: “If I have a campaign, I’ll have a strategy, but I don’t as I’m not a candidate. But I think that if anyone is going to primary an incumbent Senator then they need to have a statewide grassroots network. They need to have a message that resonates with not only the one corner of the Republican Party, but all corners of the Republican Party whether you are a veteran, whether you covet the right to life, whether you are Second Amendment supporter, whether you are a tea party person, or a liberty person, or if you are just a regular Republican who is a patriot. It’s going to take someone who can bring folks together. No one that I can tell at this point can raise the amount of money that Senator Graham has in his war chest right now, but I don’t believe that it takes this kind of resources to win a US Senate race in this State. At some point it reaches saturation level and I don’t think it’s necessarily won on TV yet, I think it’s won on the ground in grass roots.”

Greenville Post: “Nancy Mace, thanks so much for your time.”

MACE: “Thanks.”

Nancy Mace is the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. She is the author of In the Company of Men published by Simon and Schuster. She is a small business owner of a public relations and marketing firm, The Mace Group, based in Charleston, South Carolina.

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