In primary fight, Gullick turns to seasoned political strategist

Rod Shealy has worked on some of South Carolina's most storied campaigns over his long career as a political strategist. He's been called the "shrewdest" mind in South Carolina politics. And he's always easy to spot in one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts.

This year, he's helping a number of candidates running for the state Legislature, including York County's own Carl Gullick. The Lake Wylie Republican faces a primary challenge from Christian school founder and Fort Mill resident Kyle Boyd.

Gullick is taking nothing to chance. He's already raised roughly $28,000 to fund his bid for a second term. And he's already paid $16,500 to Shealy for consulting services, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.

Gullick has also paid about $2,200 for work done by the political machine known as Joe St. John. Earlier this year, from his home in Fort Mill, St. John helped Mike Huckabee dominate York County in the GOP primary. Like Shealy, St. John has now turned his attention to local races.

Shealy's advice is quickly becoming evident. This past week, Gullick sent out a mailer to voters in his northern York County district hitting back hard against accusations that he votes as a liberal. My colleague Andrew Dys tells me he received one of Gullick's postcards.

The accusations against Gullick came from South Carolinians for Responsible Government (SCRG), a Columbia-based conservative interest group.

Turns out that Shealy is working with a number of candidates targeted by SCRG. The common link is that none get along with Gov. Mark Sanford, according to FITSNews, a political blog out of Columbia.

"Shealy’s ultimate goal," FITSNews wrote, will be to "get the media to play up the “Sanford conspiracy” angle as a method of deflecting attention away from his clients’ records on tax and spending issues."

Remember, Gullick is among the legislators whose name showed up on a so-called "hit list" of moderate Republicans being targeted by interest groups linked to Sanford.

Responding to the now-familiar accusations, Gullick says he's a progressive conservative who stands against school vouchers and cares about the environment, two positions that put him at odds with others in the GOP. Gullick acknowledges supporting tax increases while chairman of the York County Council back in the 1990s, but says the county had little choice given its need to build a jail and deal with a backlog in the Solicitor's Office.

This is how Harper's Magazine describes Shealy: "In 2006, Shealy ran the Republican primary campaign of Andre Bauer for lieutenant governor. Bauer was given virtually no chance of winning– especially after a traffic stop during the campaign when he was clocked going 110 miles per hour–but prevailed in a runoff election against the son of Carroll Campbell, a revered former governor."

Gullick and Bauer traveled around the district this month meeting with voters and taping a local TV show.

More from the Harper's profile: "Shealy gained a bit of national notoriety in 1990, when he was running the campaign of his sister, Sherry Martschink, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Shealy was looking to increase the turnout of racially conservative low-country voters, a group largely sympathetic to Martschink, in the overall Republican primary. To do so, he recruited Benjamin Hunt, Jr., an unemployed black fisherman, to run for congress in the Republican primary against incumbent Arthur Ravenel, Jr., even paying Hunt’s filing fee. When the ploy was revealed, Shealy was convicted and fined for violating campaign laws."

Anyways, political watchers may find it interesting that someone with such a long history in South Carolina politics is now running one of our local state House races.