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Politico - June 29, 2014: No place like home: Romney scapegoat wins in Miss. The novel’s plot is now almost eerily prescient: A cynical Republican consultant returns to his native Mississippi to run a slash-and-burn campaign, grappling with cartoonish scandals and echoes of his childhood in the civil rights era. In the end, an aging political throwback — a genteel ex-governor — lands a place in the U.S. Senate.

Stuart Stevens wrote the satirical book, “Scorched Earth,” in 1994. In 2014, he practically lived it.

The former senior strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Stevens decamped this spring to Mississippi to help steer Sen. Thad Cochran through a trying reelection fight. Settling in a hotel a few miles from the home on Jackson’s Piedmont Street where he grew up, the Republican operative became a mercurial presence around the race. An ad-maker by trade, Stevens popped up on Cochran’s campaign bus, near the senator’s side during a predawn stop at the Ingalls shipyard, on the sidelines of a Chris McDaniel event featuring Romney’s old nemesis, Rick Santorum.........

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".......Stevens’ ties to the Mississippi political elite go back decades: His father, Phineas Stevens, co-founded the law firm Butler Snow, the legal powerhouse where former Gov. Haley Barbour now hangs his hat. Stevens came up in politics as a driver to William Winter, the Democratic governor who remains a hero to civil rights progressives, and advised Barbour’s two successful campaigns. Austin Barbour, the former governor’s nephew, who is credited with the nuts-and-bolts turnaround of Cochran’s effort, is a strategist at Stevens’ firm. His father and mother, Pat, still reside in the state, and a sister lives in Laurel, in the heart of McDaniel’s state Senate district.".........