Christina Jeffrey challenging Bob Inglis for SC-04
The long-running assumption that Rep. Bob Inglis would receive a primary challenger came to fruition today when Christina Jeffrey announced her intention to run for the Fourth District seat in 2010.
“Bob Inglis is symbolic of the path many Republicans have taken over the past few years as he has continued to compromise our conservative values,” Jeffrey said in a Thursday news release. “He is sadly out of touch with his constituents. Times have changed, but the principles that brought the Republican Party to power in 1980 are the principles held by the majority of his constituents and the principles that we must have in the nation’s capital.”
Inglis has recently come under fire for his efforts as part of a group of congressional Republicans and GOP governors to push for new energy methods and energy independence beyond the previous party orthodoxy.
However, Inglis hasn’t had much trouble dispatching his past primary opponents for the seat, including beating Charles Jeter by more than 2-to-1 in 2008. The Travelers Rest resident made a name for himself by upsetting Rep. Liz Patterson, but could not take out Sen. Fritz Hollings in the Democrat’s last reelection bid in 1998. Jim DeMint won the district that year, and Inglis returned to win back the seat when DeMint ran for, and won, Hollings’ open seat.
Jeffrey has been a professor at several universities and was named historian of the historic 104th Congress by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. A kerfuffle arose about actions on her part in 1988 to try to deny federal funding to an educational program about the Holocaust on the fact that it did not represent the views of the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan, and she was fired by Gingrich in January 1995.
At the time, there was a split among some Jewish groups about the incident, as the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced Jeffrey’s evaluation of the program, while the Anti-Defamation League later in ’95 called criticisms of her unfounded and unfair.
Recently, Jeffrey ran for the Republican nomination in S.C. House District 32, losing to Rep. Derham Cole Jr., 52-48. In that race, she went with veteran consultant Rod Shealy Sr. If her news release is any indication, Kerry Wood, who was behind Sen. Shane Martin’s surprising upset of former Sen. Jim Ritchie, is running her operation this time.
