Last night, Steve Morrison posted this on Facebook:

Friends, thank you for all of your wonderful support in my campaign for Mayor. While we did not achieve the result we wanted, Gail and Gregory and I are blessed by your friendship, energy and affection. Thanks to you we lifted up ideas and ideals in our honorable and competetive campaign.

I responded that he has every right to be proud of the race he ran, adding that I’m proud to know him.

If there was a flaw in his campaign, it was that he got into it too late. He told me several weeks back that he thought it was just the right amount of time, but it wasn’t — Steve Benjamin had essentially been running for a year, and had been geared up for a battle against a 20-year incumbent. And Finley had the power of incumbency as a council member. Sure, prominent businessmen of excellent character have won last minute campaigns before in South Carolina — if I recall correctly, Bill Barnet became mayor of Spartanburg in a write-in campaign measured in days rather than weeks. But while I don’t know much about what Barnet was up against, I doubt it was a Steve Benjamin and a Kirkman Finlay III.

That said, what’s remarkable is how well Steve Morrison did in spite of that, making it a real three-way contest, to the point that you couldn’t tell until almost all the votes were counted that he wouldn’t make the runoff. Chalk that up to the esteem in which he is held among those who know him.

For years, I’ve urged Steve to run for public office. Every time I heard him deliver a speech — usually at Urban League functions, as he and I served on that board together for about a decade — I would be impressed again by his deep sincerity and understated dignity, underscored by an obvious mastery of his facts, making him the very embodiment of someone in whom public trust should be invested. I think those qualities are what enabled him to do as well as he did in spite of his late entry. Where Benjamin might seem too glib and Finlay too grating, Morrison was reassuring as well as inspiring.

Given all that, at a time like this one searches for the reasons he didn’t prevail. I think the lateness is likely the bigger factor. If there’s anything else, it would be that — being the class act that he is, and determined to conduct a positive, gentlemanly campaign — he never made a compelling case as to why anyone shouldn’t vote for either of the candidates who were so well established before he got into it.

That was the question in my mind. My very first reaction when I heard he might run was, “What, in his mind, is wrong with Steve Benjamin?” Because that would be the primary reason to run, since before that point, the other Steve looked like the guy who would win without a runoff. Was it the Advance America thing? Was it something else? And if you don’t like Benjamin for mayor, tell us why it shouldn’t be Finlay? But Steve M. never said; he stayed above that fray. So on the one hand, that left an important question that needed to be answered for him to prevail.

On the other, it made for a classy campaign that did not seek in any way to benefit from tearing anyone else down. And for that, we can all thank Steve Morrison.