Mike Hollihan at Half-Bakered has a post on discriminiation against atheists in the Tennessee Constitution. The relevant paragraph is Article IX, Section 2, which reads

No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.

Earlier, however, in Article I, Section 4, the Tennessee Constitution declares

That no political or religious test, other than an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and of this State, shall never be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under this State.

Now how exactly can requiring that someone not deny the existence of God, or “future state of rewards and punishments,” not amount to a religious test? It would seem to even exclude Christian Universalists, who hold that everyone will be saved and no one will go to Hell.

And I wonder how broad the phrase “any office in the civil department of this State” is supposed to be. Are atheists not allowed to be Tennessee State Troopers?

Both Robert Prather (a Mississippi State grad) and Steven Taylor have noted the hiring of Sylvester Croom as head coach of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, and believe it is a positive step, a position I generally agree with—although, like Steven, I wish the reason why the national media was paying attention to my adopted state was due to something other than race. (Apparently, there’s a law that the only stories about Mississippi are allowed to be about race—directly or tangentially—or WorldCom, neither of which usually reflect well on us. Ex-governor Kirk Fordice’s now-abandoned slogan—“Only Positive Mississippi Spoken Here”—reflects that frustration.)

Of course, the inevitable comparisons between State and Ole Miss had to be trotted out, both by ESPN, as noted by Steven Godfrey in Thursday’s Daily Mississippian, and by others—even relatively local media—as Spencer Bryan notes in today’s DM. ESPN dragged out decades-old footage of Rebel fans waving Confederate battle flags at Ole Miss home games—dating from when Ole Miss was too cheap to paint the helmets that came from the factory—while failing to note the inconvenient fact that purple-and-gold faux Confederate banners adorning LSU fans outnumbered the genuine article at the recent LSU-Ole Miss matchup. On the academic side of the ledger, Ole Miss’ record of hiring and promoting minorities is far better than State’s. And if the Rebels had gone 2–10 instead of 9–3, I think there’s a good chance that Croom would have been introduced at a very similar-looking press conference here in Oxford this week instead.

Other takes are at Outside the Beltway, The American Mind, and StateDOG.

Amanda Butler and Will Baude note some idiocy going on in the comments at The Daily Kos. In fairness to Kos, it looks like the message in question is a comment and not an actual post made by a bona fide Kos article poster, so it’s hard for me to get too upset about it (except to repeat my regular complaint about blog comment sections in general).

That being said, both Amanda and Will have excellent rebuttals to this full-fledged display of ignorance. I won’t pretend that Mississippi doesn’t have its quota of bigots—I’ve had the dubious pleasure of teaching at least a couple of them—but I don’t think I’ve been anywhere in America, “southern” or not, that lacked a few unreconstructed racists running around.

Links via Pejmanesque.

Matthew Stinson links to a Jonathan Chait TNR piece that takes Howard Dean to task for his vague Southern strategy. As Chait points out, it’s Southern Politics 101 all over again:

So Dean’s plan is to get poor Southern whites to vote their economic interests rather than their cultural predilections. How simple! Why hasn’t somebody else thought of that idea? Oh wait, that’s right: Everybody has thought of that idea.

The notion that the Southern economic elite try to divide the populace along racial rather than economic lines goes back around 400 years. Even though most southern whites didn’t own slaves, a majority of them supported the institution. ...

As it turns out, forging that economic coalition is a good deal more difficult than it sounds. The only success liberals have enjoyed has come when they’ve found candidates like Bill Clinton, who distanced himself from cultural liberalism (on issues like crime and welfare, for instance) to convince Southern whites that he was more conservative than the national Democratic Party.

Actually, before the 1960s maybe-realignment, southern Democrats regularly ran on economic issues—and won. The most infamous example is Huey Long, but national Democrats running for the presidency were winning electoral college votes across the South into the 1960s. What’s changed?

1. Since the Great Society programs of LBJ, and their consolidation under Nixon, there’s a sufficient national “safety net” that Republicans are not going to dismantle—no matter what rhetoric you hear from the far left. This has diminished the economic interest of poor whites in supporting Democratic candidates.
2. The national Democratic party has moved away from the conservative values shared by southern whites, most infamously in its blanket support for Roe v. Wade. This makes Republicans relatively more appealing.

Can national Democrats recapture the South? Unless they can neutralize Republicans’ natural advantage on “race, guns, God and gays,” or can come up with an economic program that is overwhelmingly appealing to both poor whites and blacks (perhaps like Dean’s idea of “affirmitive action” on the basis of economic status, rather than race), that seems exceedingly unlikely.

Is it just me, or are these sorts of editorials only written when Republicans win elections?

As Steven Taylor notes, GOP candidate Ernie Fletcher has won Kentucky’s open gubernatorial seat, and Haley Barbour has a fairly robust lead in Mississippi—so robust, in fact, that Barbour made a victory speech just after midnight, despite the slim remaining chance that he will not receive the absolute majority of the vote required to avoid the legislature deciding the election (as they did in Ronnie Musgrove’s victory over Mike Parker in 1999).

John Cole credits the successes of Fletcher and Barbour to DNC head Terry MacAuliffe. However, I’d probably chalk it up to something more fundamental: in the mass media and Internet age, the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly nationalized, with little scope for state parties to tack too far from the national party’s position. Even in Mississippi, a state where “yellow dog Democrats” have had a lot of sway, that’s slowly fading as Democrats retire or change parties. Take, for example, one political scientist’s observations on the election*:

John Bruce, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi, said though Musgrove and Barbour ran a tough campaign with ads criticizing each other, the two candidates took similar positions on many issues.

Bruce said he took statements about gun ownership, abortion and other issues off campaign Web sites and quizzed his students about which candidate had made the statements. He said many thought the statements came from Barbour — but all the positions came from Musgrove.

“They’re both conservative,” Bruce said. “They’re almost identical on a lot of issues.”

And “almost identical” southern Democrats are increasingly finding that southern voters will choose the real thing—Republicans—over conservative Democrats who increasingly have to rely on the support of groups—like African-Americans, state employees, and transplanted Northern liberals—who aren’t conservative at all.

That isn’t to say that parties can’t field successful candidates in states where their national ideology isn’t competitive—the most obvious case in point would be the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But they’re going to be in an uphill struggle, without the ability to bring in “name” fellow partisans to support them, and they’re going to need to work much harder than they’d have had to in the past to convince local voters that they are truly “independent” of the national party. Ronnie Musgrove couldn’t do either, and ultimately that is what cost him this election.

PhotoDude has more on this theme, tying it into the whole Dean flag flap (via InstaPundit), and Stephen Green notes the GOP surge, but encourages Republicans not to get cocky.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has an election results page up on its website covering northeast Mississippi, including Oxford and Lafayette County. So far, it’s all zeros; polls closed about 45 minutes ago, so some results should start trickling out soon.

Howie Dean’s latest gaffe has sparked a substantial discussion in the blogosphere about the so-called “Southern Strategy”; Steven Taylor has something close to the post I’d write if I had more time.

From the scholarly perspective, I think most political scientists have attributed the maybe-realignment of the 1960s to racial issues (see, for example, the book-length treatments by Carmines and Stimson and Huckfeldt and Sprague), but Abramowitz (1992 AJPS, I think; might have been JOP) makes a strong case that those issues weren’t driving Republican success in the 1980s—although he leaves the question of the 1960s aside, and I don’t think people in political science were particularly enamoured with his use of exploratory factor analysis to demonstrate his point. However, I think there’s a paper to be written either trying to apply Abramowitz’s methodology to the 1960s-era data or looking at it over the history of the ANES using the Cumulative file; unfortunately, from a publication standpoint, I think realignment is no longer the sexy topic it was in the late 80s and early 90s.

More evidence that Howie Dean is moving right after securing the support of the Atrios fringe: he’s daring to say that just maybe all Southerners who fly the Confederate battle flag aren’t necessarily racists—an article of common sense that nonetheless escapes most national Democrats, who apparently don’t bother talking to their fellow partisans—except the ones who wear the Quixotic “I’m a progressive” label like some sort of pathetic badge of honor—in states like Mississippi and Georgia.

Oh yes, Dean’s now flirting with the DLC wing of the party:

Yesterday, Dean said he wants to create a biracial coalition in the South. “For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic,” he said. “The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if southern white working families and African American working families come together under the Democratic tent.”

I still think the “Dean is a moderate” meme is a load of flaming crap, and his idea of national security policy is worse than a joke. I think he’d roll over for the gun controllers in Congress in a heartbeat (not that I’m hugely invested in that issue). And I generally believe that anyone who can excite large numbers of college undergrads about his campaign is prima facie unsuitable for high office. But if he keeps saying sensible things like this I might actually have to reconsider my overall assessment of the guy.

Mind you, I’m still voting for Sharpton in the primary, because I’d love nothing more than to see the Democratic Party have to deal with the consequences of spending years coddling this race-baiting fool.

Rick Henderson is puzzled by the “Libertarians for Dean” phenomenon, including its backing by some of his former colleagues at Reason.

David Bernstein is happy Charles Pickering’s nomination went down in flames today; Matthew Stinson isn’t. I said my piece on the topic in June, but I’ll repeat it here:

[M]y message to Democrats remains the same: if you believe he’s unfit to serve on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals [on the grounds that he treats minorities unfairly], by definition he’s also unfit to serve as a district court judge. Be consistent, call for his impeachment and removal from office, and find some additional evidence, and then I might take your objections seriously. Until then, the whole situation reeks of inside-the-beltway politics and “easy,” gratuitous Mississippi bashing.

Or, as Matthew puts it:

There’s no principle in opposing Pickering’s nomination, simply partisanship. Democrats invent the Pickering-as-racist bogeyman charge because it’s a much better story than them saying that Pickering is “unfit” to be a judge simply because he’s a Republican.

Now—unlike Matthew—I don’t particularly care if Pickering becomes a judge or not. But if Democrats continue to play games with the filibuster, they’re either going to find the shoe on the other foot (do you honestly see Orrin Hatch rolling over for Howie Dean when he tries to put Stephen Reinhardt on the Supreme Court?) or themselves out their last real weapon against Republican hegemony—because I guarantee you that if the Republicans can scrape together sixty Senate seats, the filibuster as we know it will be gone from the Senate rules faster than you can say “Jim Jeffords’ office is a converted broomcloset.”

Scipio, at The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, blames Trent Lott for the whole debacle. Yeah, that’s about right…

Steven Taylor, here and here, and Matthew Stinson both do me the favor of explaining why I’m not a huge fan of the Stars and Bars Southern Cross. Steven says it far more eloquently than I could:

My question to those who are adamantly in favor of the flag: why? What does it uniquely mean to you about your Southern heritage? And even if it means something dear to your heart, isn’t whatever it is you wish to extol being tainted by what the flag signifies to others?

I think a lot of white Southerners do, deep down, recognize that; hence why I often hear comments like “the blacks are just pretending they’re offended by the flag” or “I know one black guy who isn’t offended, so I really don’t think blacks in general are.” So I think the key to change here is not necessarily to get whites to change their views about the flag, but rather to convince them that blacks’ views on the flag are genuinely-held, rather than a fabrication of the NAACP and the SCLC and professional race-baiters like Al Sharpton.

Meanwhile, if you’re not entirely sick of the gubernatorial campaign, you can read this Emily Wagster Pettus piece on the Rebel flag’s role in the gubernatorial race. And, as a special bonus, Amy Tuck finally signed that affidavit saying she’d never had an abortion (no, don’t ask… I don’t even pretend to understand what that’s all about).

Mississippi goes to the polls in six days to elect a governor. And, if we’re really lucky, the people—not the House of Representatives—will elect this one.

On the issues I personally care about, the candidates are about indistinguishable. As Sid Salter points out, Ronnie Musgrove is essentially running—at least in white precincts—as a Republican who accidentally got the Democratic nomination. Maybe that’s just as well; for better or worse, there aren’t many Mississippians who share my, dare I say extremist, views on personal and economic liberty. There just aren’t that many Mississippians who are pro-choice (never mind that you can’t get a legal abortion in this state outside of Jackson, making the abortion issue essentially moot), pro-gay marriage, anti-Stars and Bars, and against burdensome economic regulations (like the absurd situation that has essentially shut down the distribution of wine and liquor in the state because our state liquor monopoly can’t make its computers work right). I’d worry if the major parties thought they could run a candidate who would appeal to me.

Ironically, if Ronnie Musgrove lived up to the reputation his detractors pinned on him, I might actually be tempted to vote for him. The truth of the matter, though, is that Musgrove barely lifted a finger to promote the new flag; he endorsed it and then went into virtual hiding until the referendum went down in flames in April 2001. Don’t get me wrong—I think the referendum was doomed to failure no matter how much effort was put into backing it. And I recognize that the referendum was largely engineered to forestall the initiative drive to amend the constitution to make the current flag virtually unalterable—an option still on the table should the legislature decide to mess with the flag again. But make no mistake: Ronnie Musgrove did no more than was absolutely required to keep his ass from getting grief from the Legislative Black Caucus.

Similarly, if Ronnie Musgrove had so much as lifted a finger to help blacks in this state I might be tempted to vote for him. Now, I understand Ronnie’s going to get 90% of the black vote just for having a (D) next to his name on the ballot. What has he done to deserve it? Turning the health department into a racial fiefdom may have helped some well-connected blacks in Jackson, but it’s hard to see how a sharecropper in the Delta benefited from that.

The bottom line is: Ronnie Musgrove isn’t a liberal, in any sense of the word. He’s only a Democrat because that’s what you needed to be to get elected to the state senate in Panola County. His own press is 100% accurate: “conservative, independent.” He makes 1980s-era Al Gore (not to be confused with the Y2K model) look like a McGovernik. Which is a shame, because you could do worse than 80s Al Gore.

Which brings me to what’s behind Door #2: Haley Barbour. If Musgrove is “conservative, independent,” Barbour is “conservative, conservative.” He is what he is. Those who criticize him for BlackHawkGate seem to miss the point; if Ronnie’s schedule had worked out properly, there’d be matching photos up at the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website: one with Haley’s beaming mug, and another with Ronnie’s right next to it. My general assessment of Barbour is that he’s a cipher as far as what he’d do in office. Oddly enough (for those who stereotype such things), Barbour’s Washington experience makes him by far the more worldly of the two candidates.

And, ultimately, I think that’s what this state needs. If only Nixon could go to China, maybe only someone like Barbour can come back to Mississippi. Someone needs to tell my fellow Mississippians that it ain’t 1962 any more, and that message isn’t going to be well-received coming from a Democrat. I don’t know if Haley Barbour is the man to deliver that message, but I sure as hell know that Ronnie Musgrove isn’t. So for governor, Haley Barbour (R) it is.

In other races:

• In the battle of the barking moonbats, aka the lieutenant governor’s race, I’ll be voting for Barbara Blackmon (D), mainly because I know she won’t win.
• For secretary of state, Eric Clark (D/I) because he seems competent enough. Wish he’d do something about all the Java on his pages though…
• For attorney general, I honestly don’t know.
• Auditor: Phil Bryant (R/I).
• Treasurer: Gary Anderson (D).
• Agriculture commissioner: dunno, don’t care; they’re all State graduates anyway…
• Insurance commissioner: don’t know.
• Public service commissioner, northern district: we have a public service commission?
• Transportation commissioner, northern district: Bill Minor (D).
• District attorney: I don’t even know which district I’m in. Sigh. Guess I have to figure that out.
• State senator: Gray Tollison (D)—I think former Oxford mayor Pat Lamar’s a twit. Demerits for his brother running my water company into the ground, though.
• State representative: some jackass who shares my name (the joy of spending the $15 filing fee to run… priceless).
• Constitutional amendment #1 (deborking the College Board): no, because I’m in a contrarian mood.
• County offices: no clue.

Greg Wythe (GregsOpinion.com) notes a Washington Post account looking at the Texas and Colorado redistricting plans; notably, it quotes a lot of political scientists, instead of the legal scholars that generally appear in these accounts.

Notable quote from the article:

Whatever the answers, Thomas E. Mann, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that the Texas and Colorado experiments in multiple redistricting could have profound political consequences.

“If this is sustained, what we will have is a form of arms race where there is no restraint on keeping the game going on throughout a decade,” Mann said. “You ask, who wins in this process? This is a process designed not for citizens or voters but for politicians. It will lead politicians to say there are no limits. I think it threatens the legitimacy of democracy.”

I think this is the natural consequence of the Supreme Court’s muddled post-Baker jurisprudence: insistence on exact population equality between districts, despite the huge known sampling error of the Census making that equality essentially meaningless; a ridiculous level of deference to partisan gerrymanders coupled with the unclear dictates of the Voting Rights Act and vague, O‘Connoresque prohibitions against racial gerrymanders—which, due to bloc voting by African-Americans, are virtually indistinguishable from partisan gerrymanders; widespread abandonment of any conception of geographic compactness or geographic logic as desirable features for districts; naked partisanship by the federal judiciary; and a general failure to incorporate anything that political scientists who do applied and theoretical research in the field contribute. No wonder it’s a giant playground for political opportunists from both parties.

I still think the only viable way to eliminate this mischief is to incorporate an element of proportional representation into the system—even two or three seats in a state the size of Texas, elected by “top up” proportional representation, would be enough to both undermine the possible benefits of partisan gerrymanders and ensure that incumbent-protection gerrymanders don’t lead to a sclerotic delegation.

The Clarion-Ledger today has polling data showing Barbour ahead of Musgrove, but in a statistical dead heat. Telling stat:

Experts say Musgrove needs to make inroads among white voters, 25 percent of whom said they’re backing the governor.

Bad prediction:

Musgrove holds another advantage. If neither candidate gets a majority, the election would wind up in the Democratically controlled Mississippi Legislature, just as it did in 1999, [Jackson State political science professor Leslie] McLemore said. “If it goes to the House, Musgrove will win it.”

Actually, if it goes to the House, dollars to donuts says either they elect the plurality winner (even if that means quite a few conservative Democrats have to switch parties) or we have a nice, long period of protracted litigation in federal court that ends with the plurality winner ending up in office anyway.

Lauren Landes, guesting at Patrick Carver’s Ole Miss Conservative blog, notes that Haley Barbour has picked up endorsements from 42 state Democrats, angering the state Democratic Party leadership. The list of Barbour endorsers is here. In general, it looks like a list of has-beens and small fry; notably, no current member of the state House or Senate appears on the list.

Meanwhile, Eric Stringfellow continues to blast Haley Barbour from the pages of the Clarion-Ledger.

Mississippi is unique among the states in retaining an elected transportation commission. The state is divided into three commission districts, and each district elects a commissioner who serves a four-year term. The retirement of incumbent commissioner Zack Stewart has created a heated race in the northern district, with two major-party nominees vying for the post:

• Bill Minor, a Democrat from Holly Springs (Marshall County) who has served in the state legislature since 1980, most recently as chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.
• John Caldwell, a Republican from Nesbit (DeSoto County) who is a two-term county commissioner.

Minor credits himself with leading the struggle for the passage of the 1987 Four-Lane Highway Program, which increased the state gasoline tax to 18.4¢/gal. with the increased revenues dedicated to relocating and widening nearly two thousand miles of state highways. (The 2002 reauthorization of the four-lane program, “Vision 21,” added over a thousand more miles to be constructed or widened in the coming two decades.) Minor’s slogan is “Keep Minor working for Mississippi highways“; a wag might say that Minor could easily keep working on them if he’d stayed in his safe Senate seat. (This Bill Minor may or may not be related to the other Bill Minor who’s a political columnist for the Clarion-Ledger.)

Unfortunately, Caldwell’s site seems to be Flash-driven, and none of my browsers are being very cooperative with Flash today. So I can’t really say much about his campaign.

I don’t think this race is going to be about issues; the public statements by both candidates have generally favored the same things: pursuing (and completing) Vision 21, constructing Interstate 69 through the Delta, and supporting the upgrade of U.S. 78 between Memphis and Birmingham to Interstate 22. One concern that neither candidate seems to have addressed is the state’s rural bridge problem, with a large number of rural bridges on county roads—many constructed in the 1920s and 1930s—beyond their lifespan and in dire need of repair. Another potential concern is that—reading between the lines—many people in the southern part of the state apparently thought that Zack Stewart was delaying projects along the Gulf Coast so more money could be spent up north; will a new commissioner ameliorate these tensions, or exacerbate them?

Since the issues don’t distinguish the candidates, what will? Although the Northern District is geographically large (see this map), the only major population centers are the Memphis urbanized area (DeSoto, Tunica, and Marshall counties), Tupelo, and the Columbus-Starkville-West Point “Golden Triangle” region. Minor probably has more name recognition overall due to his service in the legislature, and seems to have been more aggressive in getting billboards and signs; on the other hand, Caldwell is probably better-known in DeSoto County, the most populous county in the district by far.

Overall, I think Minor probably will win the election by a substantial margin on the basis of his better name recognition, if only because a lot of Mississippi voters haven’t been accustomed to voting a straight ticket (I think Barbour will win almost all of the counties in the northern district handily, with the exception of the heavily-black Delta counties; Panola County, the home of Ronnie Musgrove; and possibly Lafayette County, which is home to all six liberals in the state).

Patrick Carver has a set of predictions up for the upcoming Mississippi election. Below the lieutenant governor’s race, most of the down-ballot elections have gotten almost zero publicity, which will probably favor incumbents (Anderson, though, will probably be helped by black turnout, as Patrick notes).

One thing I will say is that if the election does go to the Mississippi House, I think the plurality winner will be chosen by them regardless. If Barbour wins a plurality, there are two many “yellow dog” Democrats who will be absolutely killed in 2007 if they don’t vote for Barbour. And if Musgrove wins the plurality, the 1999 precedent (where Musgrove was the slight plurality winner) suggests that black Democrats aren’t interested in making a deal with the Republicans to cut out the “yellow dogs” and elect a Republican governor. Obviously the Legislature needs to amend the system—frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t been ruled unconstitutional already because of Baker v. Carr—but I’m not holding my breath on that happening.

Mark at Not Quite Tea and Crumpets posts his thoughts on last night’s gubernatorial debate, which is thankfully the last of the campaign season. He was rather underwhelmed by Ronnie Musgrove’s performance. (I missed the debate; hopefully C-SPAN will re-run it in the next day or so, but who knows?) The Jackson Clarion-Ledger also has an account of the debate.

In other gubernatorial news, Clarion-Ledger columnist Eric Stringfellow is unimpressed by Haley Barbour’s response to his picture being used by the Council of Conservative Citizens on their web site.

Today is the second day with nothing new in the mainstream media about the Haley Barbour/Council of Conservative Citizens flap. (Today’s Clarion-Ledger pieces on the campaign both focus on voters’ lack of interest in the campaigns’ attack ads: see here and here.)

Bloggers like Kevin Drum and Atrios who jumped on the story early no longer seem interested in giving it any traction, probably because “their guy” looks about as bad as Barbour does. I can’t really blame them—after all, since it’s not about a party but rather about a whole state political elite that lends groups like the CofCC credibility, there’s no real “story” any more, if by “story” you mean “something to beat over the head of Republicans.” Moderates indeed.

The message is clear: those Mississippians who care that an avowedly racist organization is actively involved in the campaigns of both major parties in our state will receive no support in trying to get rid of this cancer from other folks—whether in the mainstream media or the blogosphere—unless there’s some partisan “win” involved. Thanks. We appreciate it.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

• Skip Perry thinks Barbour wearing a state flag lapel pin isn’t as big a deal as some are trying to make it out to be.

My earlier posts are here.

I wrote here:

On the other hand, given Musgrove’s own admission of past participation in the rally, I find it hard to fault Barbour for attending it this year. And—barring further revelations—I’m willing to give Barbour the benefit of the doubt.

But, within hours, I also wrote:

Yet despite these ties, many politicians—black, white, Democrat, Republican—continue to attend the rally, as the Magnolia Report correctly notes. As I’ve noted before, however, this is exactly the sort of thing the Council thrives on: the appearance of respectability. Getting its members in positions to glad-hand political candidates is what they want, and the Black Hawk Rally was a prime opportunity. And it’s time that Mississippi’s politicians told the Black Hawk folks once and for all, thanks but no thanks.

A bit of explanation is in order. When I wrote the first post, I was still buying Bill Lord’s allegation that the rally and barbecue were separate events, with the rally sponsored by groups unaffiliated with the Council; I don’t consider this allegation credible any more.

If I were to rewrite my first statement in terms of what I know now, I would have to say that I fault Haley Barbour for attending the rally, as I fault any other candidate for public office who attended it in the past—including Ronnie Musgrove, who’s damn lucky that his smiling face isn’t plastered on the Council’s website right next to Barbour’s. (Barbour does rack up some extra sleaze points for his failure to demand his picture be removed from the site.)

Now, you can make an argument that a principled voter should turn to one of the third-party candidates in the race. However, as a group they’re all fairly unappealing: neither the Green Party nor the Reform Party deserve even the miniscule amount of added credibility that my vote for their candidates would give them, and the other alternative is running under the slogan “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor.”

More to the point, in a close, winner-takes-all election it is irrational for voters to cast a ballot for a candidate with a negligible chance of winning the election if they have transitive preferences among the candidates with non-negligible chances to win—which is political science speak for “vote for a major-party candidate if you prefer him or her over one of the other major-party candidates.” And in this campaign—taking into account my policy preferences and the fact that on most issues of consequence Musgrove’s position is more illiberal* than Barbour’s—at the moment I still have to give a small edge to Barbour, notwithstanding his pathetic handling of this situation and refusal to come out forthrightly against the Council’s use of his picture.

In the mainstream media today:

• The DeSoto Times Today carries a writeup of its editorial board’s Friday meeting with Ronnie Musgrove.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a lengthy article on the state gubernatorial race, which explains where the “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor” signs and bumper stickers came from:

  This year, in addition to [Green Party candidate Sherman Lee] Dillon, there’s a Reform Party candidate, Shawn O‘Hara, and John Thomas Cripps, who’s running on the memory of the 2001 state flag referendum, in which voters resoundingly turned down a design—favored by Musgrove and most of the state’s business community—that would have removed the Confederate battle emblem. His posters urge voters to “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor.”

• Delta Democrat Times columnist Amy Redwines considers her vote. She writes in part:

  I used to be happy to live here, as did a lot of other young people. But that was before I grew up and began to understand what kind of situation this state is in. I love Mississippi, and it will always be my home.

  We need a person in the governor’s mansion who can make this state do a 360-degree turnaround. If that doesn’t happen, we will continue to slide downhill.

  People already think Mississippi is chock full of backward rednecks and bigots, but there is more to the people here than those superficial perceptions.

• Jackson’s alt-weekly, the Free Press has an extensive comment thread on the Barbour/CofCC/Blackhawk situation.

In the blogosphere and thereabouts:

• Not Quite Tea and Crumpets wonders if the New York Times Magazine is seeing racism where there’s really partisanship in airing complaints about Haley Barbour’s discussion of the “Musgrove-Blackmon ticket.”
• Patrick Carver elaborates on the theme, noting that Blackmon and Barbour have opposite positions on the tort reform issue; if Barbour’s going to move tort reform through the Senate, he’ll probably need a reform supporter in charge of the chamber—and Blackmon is no fan of tort reform.
• MississippiPolitical.com helpfully compiles a list of people who have attended CofCC-sponsored events (a veritable “who’s who” of Mississippi politics); there’s also a lengthy commentary that is skeptical about Barbour’s protestations of ignorance.

This post will be updated throughout Sunday; previous posts can be found here.

No new mainstream media coverage today of the Haley Barbour/Council of Conservative Citizens flap; the best resource is still Friday’s Associated Press report by Emily Wagster Pettus, who covers the Mississippi political beat for the AP. (Abbreviated versions have appeared elsewhere, including in today’s New York Times, but for the whole context I recommend reading the full version.)

However, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger’s lead editorial Saturday calls on Barbour, and other Mississippi politicians, to repudiate the Council. They write, in part:

Separatist groups — whether predominantly white or black — have no place in modern Mississippi. Neither do groups that preach hatred and distrust of religious groups.

The CCC is entitled to its views and enjoys all First Amendment rights to publish and display what it pleases on its Web site. But, at some point, Mississippi’s political elite in both parties need to stop winking and nudging over the CCC’s obvious entrenchment at the Black Hawk political gatherings and decide if they want to be identified with white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carries a lengthy, mostly negative profile of Barbour. It contains something that might be some more grist for the mill:

According to [Gene] Triggs, the once thriving town [Yazoo City] has never recovered from the period of school integration in the 1970’s and 80’s, when many whites, like Haley and Marsha Barbour, packed their children off to the private academies that were opening across the state. “Any parent has the right to send their kids where they can get the best education,” Triggs says, but keeping your kids in public school “was one positive stand a person could take to make the community better. I felt he should have exerted some leadership, and he never did.”

Around the blogosphere, things have also gotten quiet; apparently, some of those who jumped on for partisan advantage are having trouble trying to justify Democrats’ past participation in the rally, including appearances by Ronnie Musgrove and attorney general Mike Moore. However, there are at least some new posts:

• David Niewart (Orcinus) thinks this is another incidence of Republicans’ “congenital racism” showing itself.
• Josh Chafetz of OxBlog (in a post I somehow missed yesterday, probably because they don’t have a useful RSS feed) says “I condemn that kind of morally obtuse idiocy outright, and it would be really nice if some major players in the national GOP could put some pressure on Barbour to apologize.” Chafetz isn’t particularly enamored of Musgrove either, and suggests that “decent people” consider a third-party candidate (not that any of them are likely much better…).
• Greg Wythe looks at the NYT Magazine piece (scroll down a ways to see the discussion).
• Mark of Not Quite Tea and Crumpets thinks the election has gone “to hell in a handbasket”.
• LeanLeft asks if Mississippi can be given back in light of Musgrove’s past participation in the rally. (Back to who? The Indians?)

My posts on the topic, in reverse chronological order, appear here.

Trying to figure out this whole Black Hawk thing is a bit of a headache. Atrios is understandably confused about the ties between the two events, while Greg Wythe wants to know how Barbour got photographed with a Council of Conservative Citizens officer even though he wasn’t at the CofCC Black Hawk event. First the facts:

• The Black Hawk (or Blackhawk?) political rally is a regular event, attended by politicians of all stripes. Quoth the Magnolia Report:

  Senator Trent Lott has unwittingly given the Blackhawk Political Rally a lot of negative national media attention. However, in the state, it is still viewed as a credible campaign stop by both Democrats and Republicans, white and black. Several hundred people attended the July rally to hear candidates for local office and a handful of state and district-wide candidates.

• The rally is sponsored by two groups, the Black Hawk Bus Association and the Carrollton Masonic Lodge, according to Council of Conservative Citizens field director Bill Lord (from the WaPo account). The CofCC sponsors a barbecue at the same location that coincides with the rally.

• Lord served as the emcee for the rally in 2003.

• In the past, the rally’s sponsorship is more ambiguous. This 1999 Conservative News Service piece indicates that in 1995, the rally itself was sponsored by the Council. Lord was apparently actively involved in that rally as well:

  Lord described the event as “an old fashioned southern political rally that was completely integrated,” with about half a dozen black political candidates speaking and “maybe three dozen” blacks in attendance as spectators. According to Lord, the C of CC’s sponsorship of the event cost “around three or four thousand dollars. We sold barbecued chicken plates to make up the difference.”

• By all accounts, the Council is an offshoot of the segregationist Citizens Councils, groups with primarily middle-class support that fought desegregation efforts in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South.

Now to the analysis:

If there’s a firewall between the Council and the rally, it’s a pretty porus one. Lord, arguably the most important member of the CofCC in Mississippi, served as emcee. (Imagine, if you will, if David Duke or Louis Farrakhan served as the moderator of a presidential debate.) The Black Hawk Bus Association, the co-sponsor of the rally, buys buses for segregated private academies—an action not much lower on the moral reprehensibility scale than the Council’s white supremicist dogma. It will come as no surprise to learn that the Citizens Councils—the precursor of the CofCC—established the academies in the first place. And the Council apparently sponsored the rally in the past, even if it’s made some nominal separation from it in 2003 (no doubt in reaction to the Lott fiasco, which—quite rightly—made the group into kryptonite for any politician with ambitions beyond serving as county dogcather). So I think it’s fair to conclude, despite Lord’s protestations to the contrary, that the rally has strong ties to the Council and its agenda.

Yet despite these ties, many politicians—black, white, Democrat, Republican—continue to attend the rally, as the Magnolia Report correctly notes. As I’ve noted before, however, this is exactly the sort of thing the Council thrives on: the appearance of respectability. Getting its members in positions to glad-hand political candidates is what they want, and the Black Hawk Rally was a prime opportunity. And it’s time that Mississippi’s politicians told the Black Hawk folks once and for all, thanks but no thanks.

Today’s Associated Press report by Emily Wagster Pettus, coupled with similar reporting by The Washington Post’s political columnist Al Kamen, suggests that our friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens have been overblowing their ties to prominent politicians to puff themselves up. Indeed, the Council admitted as much:

Lord said the CCC does not endorse candidates and the Barbour picture was included on the group’s Internet site because the “Web master was just seeking some publicity for our organization.”

But the group did sponsor the Black Hawk rally, right? Well—not exactly:

Lord said the CCC held a separate barbecue the same day as the Black Hawk rally, which traditionally attracts a broad spectrum of candidates, Democratic and Republican. [emphasis added]

And what of the scandalous nature of the Black Hawk event? Democratic incumbent Ronnie Musgrove is no stranger to it:

Musgrove said Thursday he had attended the Black Hawk rally in the past but didn’t this year because of a scheduling conflict.

Did Barbour make a mistake? Sure; he shouldn’t have let himself get photographed with a prominent member of the Council. That’s Politics 101. And frankly I think he should ask the group, politely, to take his picture off the site, although legally he really can’t stop them from using it if they insist on doing so*.

So, to review, for those who don’t read blockquotes:

• The CCC doesn’t sponsor the Black Hawk rally. (The photo at their site suggests that the emcee of the rally, however, is the “Field Director” of the CCC.)
• Haley Barbour apparently wasn’t at the group’s barbecue, which is a separate event.
• Nonetheless, Barbour was photographed in a group with five other people, one of whom was the emcee of the rally and the “Field Director” of the CCC. (Whether Barbour was aware of his affiliation with the group is an open question.)

How does this affect my opinion of the matter? Obviously, I think Barbour should ask the group to remove the photo from their web site. And I’d like to see Mississippi politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—stop attending the Black Hawk rally, since at the very least the organizers apparently have no qualms about inviting a person with a leadership position in the CCC to serve as emcee of the event.

On the other hand, given Musgrove’s own admission of past participation in the rally, I find it hard to fault Barbour for attending it this year. And—barring further revelations—I’m willing to give Barbour the benefit of the doubt.

* “Rea” in comments at Ricky West’s place says that Barbour would have legal recourse if the group didn’t remove the picture after he requested it. Since IANAL, I’ll take his/her word for it.

Today’s bullet-point summary of what’s happening in the saga of Haley Barbour’s apparent coziness with the Council of Conservative Citizens, better known as the respectable man’s off-shoot of the Ku Klux Klan (which I’ll update throughout the day as events warrant). All of my posts on this topic can be found here. Scroll down for new material as the day progresses; this post will stay at the top until Day 3.

In the mainstream media:

• The Clarion-Ledger Thursday morning has an extensive piece on the whole flap. Telling quote for those who want to single out Barbour and Republicans for criticism:

  [Democratic nominee Ronnie] Musgrove said Thursday he had attended the Black Hawk rally in the past but didn't this year because of a scheduling conflict.

• The Washington Post notes that the Council of Conservative Citizens’ ties to the Black Hawk fundraiser may have been exaggerated by the group:

  But Bill Lord, the council’s Mississippi field director and one of the folks in the picture, told our colleague Tom Edsall that it should be noted Barbour spoke to a rally not sponsored by the council but by the Black Hawk Bus Association and the Carrollton Masonic Lodge. The council sponsored the Black Hawk Barbecue at the same event, but that was a separate thing.

• An article on Barbour campaigning in DeSoto County in the Memphis Commercial Appeal makes no mention of the controversy. Nice to see the CA on the ball here as always.
• At least they’re in good company; the New York Times doesn't mention it either in their account of the gubernatorial race.

Around the blogosphere:

• Greg Wythe finds Barbour’s statement regarding the photo rather weak, to say the least.
• Atrios can’t “wrap [his] head around” the concept that the rally and barbecue are separate. In fairness, it doesn’t help in trying to understand things that the emcee of the rally was a Council of Conservative Citizens officer, but the rally itself isn’t actually sponsored by the CofCC.
• Alan at Petrified Truth says Barbour has coupled “stupidity” and “moral obtuseness”, on the basis of Fox’s version of the AP report.
• Ole Miss Conservative’s Patrick Carver thinks Barbour shouldn’t be “too harshly criticized” in light of the AP/WaPo revelations; however, he thinks Barbour should distance himself more forcefully from the CofCC.
• Ricky West (North Georgia Dogma) has a followup from his post yesterday arguing that Barbour should forcefully repudiate the Council and its views; he’s got a suggested script:

  Hey, it's easy - Bob Barr did something similar - you go on O'Reilly and Larry King and Chris Matthews and say "hey, I had my picture taken with a bunch of people whose views are repugnant. It was a barbeque for the bus association & the masons and their group was a separate thing. It was a mistake to have my picture taken with them, but there were hundreds of voters there - and I'm sure any politician will tell you that it can be confusing when you're in a large group, as the famous video of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky during the rope-line gathering will illustrate - and I was shaking hands and getting my picture taken with lots of them. Nonetheless, I demand that such a racist organization remove my picture from the site (even though it's legal to have it there) and I repudiate anything and everything it stands for".

  He also thinks Democrats should consider whether or not Ronnie Musgrove has some questions he should be answering too. Steve Verdon agrees.

• Mike Hollihan thinks Barbour is now toast.
• Steve Verdon says “the whole thing simply stinks.” Blog on the Bloch is of similar mind.
• The Carpetbagger Report (cool blog name, by the way) has a challenge for Barbour.
• Arthur Silber thinks Republicans should reconsider their party allegiance in light of the situation.