“Of course, I’d thought about it. Of course, it was on my mind,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) writes in his new book America: A Redemption Story. “I’m going to do it. I am going to run for president.”
And so Timothy Scott made the decision to run for president of the Stall High School Student Government Association back in 1982. He won.
Scott was not always interested in campaigns or public service. It wasn’t until he got in trouble in the eighth grade that he even considered the idea.
“Tim Scott! You have more of a gift for gab than anyone I have ever taught,” his eighth grade teacher Ms. Edgeworth had chastised him. “Rather than using your gift while I am trying to teach, why don’t you stay after class, and we can see if we can’t find a way to harness that gift.”
Instead of detention, Edgeworth convinced Scott to run for student council, exposing him to an “exhilaration” he had only previously felt as a star running back for the football team. “To this day, I thoroughly enjoy the energy of campaigning,” Scott writes. “It’s a whirlwind, but it can also be extremely life-giving.”
The book is not all high points. Scott details election losses, including failed runs for president of Boys State and the South Carolina state senate. There are even some dark moments, including the day his mother left his father, packing 7-year-old Tim and his 9-year-old brother Ben into a lime-green Plymouth Cricket for the 18-hour drive from northern Michigan to South Carolina.
Scott draws lessons from all of these challenging moments, and he uses them to paint a picture of an America that is far from perfect but is constantly doing the best we can with what we have been given. This is not a book that sugarcoats reality. “The American dream is not fair,” Scott writes. “Every American starts his journey at vastly different places. The sky is not the limit for all of us … For black people in this country, the challenges are often greater, and their path is filled with more dead ends.”
Scott’s father is one of those people whose life included greater challenges. When we first meet him in the book, he is a verbally abusive alcoholic who tells Tim and his mother they are nothing and will never succeed. But by the end, Tim’s father has stopped drinking to excess and has quit smoking entirely. For anyone who lost a father when they were young, the story of Scott and his father’s reconciliation is sure to bring a tear to their eye. It did for me.
Scott attended college on a partial football scholarship, so the book is littered with football references throughout. For someone whose falls are spent glued to the television on Saturdays and Sundays, these references work, but they might not be for everybody. One particular passage that stuck with me was Scott’s weaving together of Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday with his own unique description of what America means to him. “The American dream is never realized overnight,” Scott writes. “Like football, my favorite game on earth, it is a game of inches. It’s won by going forward and then sometimes getting knocked back when you least expect it. There will be setbacks along the way, but little by little we have the power to change our reality.”
Scott is a young and healthy 57 years old. If he doesn’t run for president in 2024, odds are he will someday. And when he does, Republicans, and all Americans really, will be lucky to have such a hopeful, happy warrior in the race.
