Ted Christian has announced he is running against US Rep. Bob Inglis, the congressman who is so low-profile it’s easy to forget he’s even in DC. Christian is one of three candidates vying for the Democratic congressional nomination, along with Paul Corden, a former marketing executive and retired community college teacher from Spartanburg, and Bryan McCanless of Greenville. Inglis faces a primary challenge from Charles Jeter, an environmental engineer and Reagan administration official from Greer.

Here is a clip from Christian’s kick-off press conference on March 31.

Here is a bit about the candidate, taken from his Web site.

Bio:

I grew up in Florida, received a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida in 1983, and then worked in Houston on the space shuttle and space station programs until basically retiring on stock market investments in 1991. I moved to Greenville in 1999, and bought a house off North Main.

Why am I running?

As much as anything, I’d like to raise the bar a bit.

The democratic process in our country has become a money driven circus, with politicians marketed substantially like cereal, in many cases qualified for office by not much more than money and packaging, while the principal fixed goal of either main party has become greater market share and the power it brings.

The consequences of this political retailing are increasingly dire. Our country now as a matter of stated policy wages aggressive war, the greatest of crimes, invading other nations without legitimate cause. The US is increasingly under what amounts to martial law, with American citizens subject to imprisonment without charge and search without warrant. The US now tortures people, sometimes to death, and laws against torture are brushed aside by a President who essentially proclaims himself above the law. A potentially ruinous public debt continues to mount, the current administration having amassed nearly as much debt as all the previous administrations combined. The US military budget is by any rational standard morbidly obese, greater than all the military budgets for the rest of the world combined, fueling a spiraling arms race which threatens to eventually destroy humanity. The US operates a de facto concentration camp in Cuba, to the detriment of our global standing. The US is effectively a client state of Israel, degrading the quality of American political leadership and compromising prospects for peace in the Middle East. Election turnouts are at historic lows, and with the increasing use of unverified computer voting many have lost confidence their votes are even counted. The Constitution has substantially in principle, and in no small measure in fact, passed into history.

These are grave matters, yet it is unlikely most will be discussed in any substantive fashion, if they are broached at all, by most politicians in the coming election. The American political process is plainly dysfunctional, and we need to talk about it.