Witnessing Republican Disaster in Mississippi
posted by Max Blumenthal on 05/16/2008 @ 9:10pm




Last weekend, I traveled to Mississippi's first congressional district, a bastion of Republican power that has been home to William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, and the scene of massive riots on the night James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi. With the district in the midst of a hotly contested special election campaign, I probed the impact of a million-dollar Republican strategy to attack the insurgent Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, by linking him to Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

(See one of the GOP ads here): http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmat...


After following Childers on the campaign trail, then attending a rally of his Republican opponent, Greg Davis, it became apparent to me that the GOP's strategy would fail miserably. On Tuesday, the Republicans' worst nightmare came true: Childers defeated Davis by a stunning 8 point margin.

Mississippi's First encompasses a working-class region reeling from the country's economic downturn. Voters there from both parties told me they were more concerned with bread and butter issues like gas and food prices than with whether Obama's supporters fundraised online for Childers, the issue exploited by the national GOP. Childers was the perfect candidate in this environment, running as a pro-life, pro-gun economic populist who opposed free trade and promised to take on big oil. I followed the candidate around a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, watching as he pointed shoppers to the whopping prices of milk and eggs, then indignantly blamed the White House for the price spike.

While the more than a dozen Republican voters I interviewed outside the Greg Davis rally insisted to me that their candidate represented "Mississippi Values" far better than his opponent, a key theme of the Republican attack ads, several complained that the ads had poisoned the campaign, and said they resented the GOP's nationalization of the election. However, Davis was to blame for this negative tone. Though he was a successful mayor of Southaven, a white flight suburb just south of Memphis, and was widely credited for the town's economic revitalization, he allowed Washington Republican groups like Freedom's Watch and the National Republican Campaign Committee to define his campaign, thereby distracting voters from his accomplishments. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmat...