The kind of internecine warfare that once only Democrats engaged in has now become political reality within the Republican Party, certainly in Mississippi this week as establishment incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran battled Tea Party upstart Chris McDaniel to a draw Tuesday and rematch scheduled for June 24.
It was a bloody battle that featured both Cochran and
McDaniel firing the political equivalent of tomahawk missiles on the airways, a
McDaniel supporter apparently unaffiliated with the campaign alleged to have photographed
Cochran’s ailing wife in a nursing home to fuel rumors about the senator's fidelity, and both sides bringing in GOP
heavyweights to sway voters.
Cochran, 76, a U.S. senator since 1979 who previously served
five years in the U.S. House, is the last of a long tradition of Mississippi
senators and congressmen who set records for longevity by bringing home the
bacon to the nation’s poorest state. It’s a legacy that included giants like
the late John Stennis (41 years in the U.S. Senate), Jamie Whitten (53 years in
the U.S. House), and G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery (30 years in the U.S. House), and
one that nearly got Cochran defeated in the first round.
Jamie Whitten, called the “King of Pork Barrel” during his
heyday, used to brag with a big grin on his face that “pork barrel” is only
when it is in someone else’s district. Meanwhile, he raked in the federal dough
for projects like the $2 billion Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway along the
Mississippi-Alabama border. Stennis, Whitten, and Montgomery were as conservative
as any politician in Washington at the height of their careers and despite
their Democratic Party affiliation. Cochran has strong conservative bona fides
himself, but that means nothing to the anti-federal government, anti-spending
Tea Partyers.
McDaniel, a state senator who enjoyed the endorsements of
high-profile right-wingers like Sarah Palin, has been called by some a last
hope for a Tea Party that suffered losses in North Carolina, Georgia and
Kentucky. If he wins the runoff, he’ll
face Democratic challenger and former congressman Travis Childers, who is
hardly less conservative than Republicans in his state and more of a throwback
to the day when all politicians in Mississippi were Democrats and nearly all of
them were arch-conservative.
Jackson Free Press
editor-in-chief Donna Ladd says progressives don’t really have a dog in the
Mississippi race, but she sees times changing. In a column for The Guardian this week, she pointed out
that under-30 voters in Mississippi led the South in voting for Democrat John
Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. The demographics are changing, she
said, in Mississippi and across the South, yet “our politicos seem to still
believe that the only people who vote in our state are white wingnuts and
religious zealots who spread hate rather than love of their neighbors.”
Cochran is also bearer of another old tradition in
Mississippi politics—the old truism that one of the state’s U.S. senators
should be a gentleman and the other a sonofabitch. Stennis was considered the
gentleman and the late U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland, well, the other during their
long service together in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1990s, Cochran was the
gentleman while former Republican U.S. Sen. Trent Lott was the other.
However, Cochran’s gentile, quiet-spoken manner almost did
him in during this last campaign, the hardest he has had to fight in decades. He was late gearing up for the battle with McDaniel and often seemed
distracted even after it got underway.
No doubt his handlers are working super hard in his corner
right now. I can almost hear what they’re telling him:
“Okay, champ, you’re even in the count now, but you gotta
reach deep inside and find the moxie to beat that sonofabitch in the next
round!”
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