BRACK: S.C.’s Moore has juice with Kamala

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |  This was going to be the column about how S.C. Rep. J.A. Moore may be the secret go-to guy for anyone who wants influence with Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

It still will be, but we’ve got to get the gun incident straightened out first.

On Aug. 13 an hour or so before he was to pick up his daughter from her first day of kindergarten, Moore waited to pull into a parking place so he could go to a restaurant near Park Circle in North Charleston.  Then a guy in a black truck cut around him and took the space.  Moore said he rolled down his window and exchanged words with the driver.  Then he said the guy, sitting in his truck, pointed a gun at him.  Moore drove off.  

Not long later, Moore noticed the guy walking on the street, took a photo of him, returned to the lot and took a photo of his license plate, turning it over to police.  Officers reportedly found the guy in a bar. He eventually admitted to the argument, but “denied brandishing a handgun toward the victim,” according to a police report. No arrest was made at the time due to lack of corroborating evidence or witnesses, but Moore later said he would press charges.

It was scary, Moore said Wednesday.  

“It was a situation where the gentleman, for whatever reason, felt he needed to pull a gun to settle a verbal dispute,” said Moore, a Democrat elected to the legislature in 2022.  “I don’t know if there’s a legislative remedy to that.  But I do think there is a societal remedy that needs to be had.” The country, he says, needs a refreshed, new conversation about guns.

“He felt that it was OK to threaten my life over what was a verbal dispute.  I never threatened the guy’s life.”

More than likely, this will be remembered as a life-changing moment for Moore.  Just like that day in the spring of 2019 when he learned he was going to be the father of a girl.

At the time, Moore, like many state legislators, was being lobbied hard by presidential candidates for his political support in the important 2020 South Carolina Democratic presidential primary.  He’d talked with several.  Had their mobile numbers.  

So it wasn’t out of the norm for him to know how to reach then-U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California.  On the day after a gender reveal party, he phoned her to say he was going to be a little girl’s father and that he was going to support Harris’s candidacy.

“It was the fact that she was a woman of color who had a viable chance of being president and I wanted my daughter to see that image – to live in a country where that was possible,” Moore recalled this week.  He wanted Harris to prove a Black woman could be president – for his daughter.

Moore eventually became a national surrogate, including a well-publicized stint in the spin room as after the S.C. primary debate in 2020.  He co-chaired her S.C. campaign.

And they’ve stayed in touch, as he’s been invited to various Washington functions.  He said he even showed up at the recent announcement that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would be Harris’s running mate.

These days, he’s still discouraged by gun violence across the country –  from horrific mass shootings like the one in which his sister died in 2015 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston to the incident that affected him this month. But he says Harris’s candidacy is fresh and energizing.

“So many South Carolinians, both elected and people who believe in freedom and justice and that liberation takes work, are wholeheartedly supporting the vice president to be the next president.  It’s encouraging to me.”

In the months ahead, Moore will be continuing a long fight to curb gun violence and to elect a friend to be the next president.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper.  Have a comment?  Send to:  feedback@statehousereport.com.