Mediaboss Marketing

Former Rep. Bob Inglis has seen this movie before.The economy racing toward calamity. Time running out to save it. A massive stimulus bill pitched as the only way to avert catastrophe, but the politics around it less certain.

In the South Carolina Republicans case, it was the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the $787 billion rescue package that passed in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.The message to Congress then was as clear as the one coming from the White House today as the coronavirus threatens the physical and financial health of the nation: Vote for the massive spending bill or watch the American economy go up in flames.

It was just really bad at the time, we had to do something, Inglis said in a phone interview Tuesday.He remembered local community bankers imploring him to support the bill, warning him ATMs could fail by that Monday morning.Other trusted advisers warned the entire banking system could collapse if he voted no. All the people with pitchforks downtown were saying, Burn it down, tear it up. But I remember knowing I just had to do it, he recalled.

The people with the pitchforks were local tea party activists, who railed against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, embedded in the bank rescue. They quickly dubbed Inglis Bailout Bob after the vote.

Two years later, the tea partiers backed Inglis GOP primary opponent, county solicitor Trey Gowdy, who defeated him in a runoff by a landslide.Ingliss good friend and fellow Republican, Rep. Gresham Barrett, suffered a similar fate. Although Barrett had been the front-runner in his race for South Carolina governor, his eventual support for TARP served as powerful ammunition in the Republican primary, which Barrett lost to a lesser-known state representative named Nikki Haley.

Link:
He voted for a stimulus and lost his seat. And he says he'd do it all again. - Roll Call