"I will not compromise"

John Dalen wants your vote. He wants to curb government involvement in your life. And he wants to advise you against having an abortion.

(John Dalen)

The Michigan transplant has a wife and a son, loves baseball and is passionately anti-abortion, I learn during a recent interview.

When I ask him to name something that’s close to his heart, he tells me about participating in a fun run this year in Westminster, S.C., in order to raise money to purchase an ultrasound machine for an anti-abortion organization.

“I’d like to help young people ... and steer them away from abortion and help them have that baby,” said Dalen, who will appear on Tuesday’s ballot as the Constitution Party candidate for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District.

“I don’t like to see it happen," he says of abortion. "I think it’s bad for the women.”

What's also bad? Government intrusion, says Dalen, who says government is vastly overreaching its limits.

He sees the world pretty much like his Republican rival Jeff Duncan, who is running for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District, as is Democrat Jane Ballard Dyer.
  Jane Ballard Dyer (D) Jeff Duncan (R)

In fact, Dalen, 53, says the Republican candidate “seems like a nice guy, and he says a lot of the same things I do.”

The problem is the rotten state of the parties.

“It’s the parties that are corrupted, controlled by special interest money, banks, corporations," argues Dalen.

The third-party candidate grew up in Detroit, one of seven children of a bus driver and a homemaker.

Like most candidates I speak with who have moved to South Carolina from somewhere else, the confession comes with a bit of reticence. People know that any whiff of being “not from here” can make South Carolina voters wary. 

So I point out that I moved to South Carolina from Kalamazoo, Mich. just a couple years ago. And the interview starts to flow better, like a ketchup bottle that's been thumped just enough.

“I grew up in the ‘60s,” Dalen tells me. “It was a pretty turbulent era, and Vietnam was a big factor. I was 18. I was just getting out of high school when the war ended, but prior to that I was pretty worried I’m going to have to go to war. ...

In addition to that we were having civil rights things going on. I remember watching black people walking down the street and getting beat up by police ... . So those two things were big factors in shaping the way I think. I did not feel the government was pursuing the Vietnam War with the intent to win.”

Dalen, who has a small construction business, eventually moved to Los Angeles, but left, in part, he said, because it was too crowded, and “It’s polluted. You’re breathing that stuff every day.”

I ask him if he could reach compromises with people in Congress whose views differ from his. I assume this is something that’s blandly desirable.

“If you’re proposing something that’s within the constitutional limits, I’m going to be with you,” he says, as though a needle on a gauge, and not the exertion of our court system, points to the right answer.

“I will not compromise.”