Throughout her brief career as a senator and as a candidate to remain one, Darline Graham has gone to some lengths to distance herself from the legacy of her late brother while snuggling up to Donald Trump as closely as possible. That reflects a political shrewdness that Lindsey Graham himself might have ruefully endorsed.

After all, the very distinguished senior senator from South Carolina was never entirely trusted by the conservative ideologues of his state. A lot of the voters likely to dominate a low-turnout special-election runoff in the hellish heat of late August probably suspected smart-ass Lindsey looked down on them as knuckle-dragging rubes. Darline needs to steer clear of such associations, and she also needs to make herself less the biological sister of Lindsey Graham than the political stepdaughter of the 47th president, whose endorsement improbably lifted her from caretaker status to a viable candidacy for six years in the Senate.

So it’s not surprising the novice senator doesn’t want to talk about the foreign-policy turf where Lindsey spent his happiest years, instead dwelling on MAGA daily bread like deporting aliens and keeping them from stealing elections to get themselves some welfare benefits. The question is whether Darline Graham is taking the dumb-rube act a bit too far. Certainly the national media thinks she did so in the one debate she entertained with runoff rival Ralph Norman, as described by the Associated Press:

Sen. Darline Graham stumbled in a Tuesday night debate over an elementary question about foreign policy, a signature issue of her late brother. It was a high-profile misstep a week before she faces a runoff election in her bid to hold onto the South Carolina seat to which she was appointed last month.Graham, a political novice, was asked whether the U.S. has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea — a longstanding contention of both Democratic and Republican........

© Daily Intelligencer