Who Am I?

Strom Thurmond

I'm a younger, racist, pre-hair plugs incarnation of Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), the longest-serving senator in U.S. history—and by common acclamation, one of the horniest, too.

Before joining the World's Greatest Deliberative Body in 1954, I was a state senator, a circuit judge, and governor of the Palmetto State. In 1948, I even made a pretty strong showing when I ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket. The Dixiecrats were a rump group that split from the Democrats when the party pledged support for civil rights. (I was a Dem until the mid-'60s, when I switched to the GOP.) I carried four states and garnered 39 electoral votes, an amazing total for a third party candidate.

Yesterday, I celebrated my 100th birthday and was feted by all sorts of folks, including a bunch of colleagues, most of the U.S. Supreme Court, and a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (my staff doesn't reportedly refer to me as "The Sperminator" for nothin').

We laughed, joked, and reminisced about the good ol' days, like when this photo of me was taken (that's my first wife Jean at the typewriter). The year was 1956, and I was working on an early draft of what became known as the "Southern Manifesto," a ringing endorsement of Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" reading of the U.S. Constitution. A year later, I would set the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history, talking around the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

Those good times in the land of cotton are now mostly forgotten. But hey y'all, don't mistake me for some kind of Faulkner character who couldn't adapt to the changing times. Over the years, I ditched the segregationist shtick—I'm comfortable using Yiddishisms even if I've been labeled a foe of Israel by Jewish World Review's Jonathan Tobin—and became a legendary, equal opportunity pork-barrel spender, doling out dollops of tax money to anyone who could vote for me, regardless of race, creed, or gender—and even if I tried to stop them from being able to vote for me in the first place.