Posted on 08/03/2002 11:28:03 AM PDT by Dog Gone
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (AP) -- Mississippi congressmen locked in a life and death political struggle, Ronnie Shows and Chip Pickering hug warily before settling down to debate in the steamy, open-air pavilion of the Neshoba County Fair.
Pleasantries over, Republican Pickering says the campaign is a referendum on ``the values that we in Mississippi share,'' the party that embraces those values and his ability to work with President Bush.
Shows, the Democrat, swiftly casts the election in populist terms as a contest between ``the working people and the corporate elite.''
How the voters weigh these competing claims in November -- in a churchgoing, rural Mississippi district in the shadow of bankrupt WorldCom, and elsewhere around the country -- will determine the outcome of this race and affect the larger battle for control of the U.S. House.
Needing to gain seven seats to take charge, Democrats once hoped to find victory in midterm election trends that customarily help the party locked out of the White House.
Instead they have spent the past year trying to dent the popularity of a wartime president and the political shelter it has given Republicans.
The wave of accounting scandals gives them fresh hope in scattered races, many of them in rural districts, that will be pivotal in getting a House majority.
``The bottom has fallen out on the mood of the country,'' a prominent Republican polling firm cautioned recently, warning that if it persists, GOP candidates will suffer.
In Shows' case, the 55-year-old lawmaker stresses his conservative voting record with his economic message. ``Chip, I've been voting for pro-life issues since you were in high school and I was in the state Senate,'' he says.
The state is losing one of its five congressional seats because of sluggish population growth in the 1990s, and Pickering and Shows are competing for one seat in central Mississippi. Pickering is seeking a fourth term, Shows a third.
Shows is the underdog. His hope is to turn out his black supporters on election day and use his populist themes to attract enough rural white voters to carry him to victory.
``Given the decline in the economy and the fall in the stock market and concerns over retirement security, that message makes very good sense in many district around the country,'' says Howard Wolfson, executive director of the House Democratic campaign committee.
The view seems different at the 114-year-old Neshoba County Fair, where politics long ago took root in the red clay soil around Founders Square and its tin-roofed pavilion
For all the talk about corporate greed and accounting fraud, says Pickering supporter Doyle Russell, ``I don't know whether to blame Chip for it or Ronnie for it, either one.''
``It's sort of Pickering's race to lose,'' says Malcolm White, a Shows supporter. ``I think he's capable of it.''
The race is uphill for Shows, made more so when Senate Democrats engineered the rejection of Pickering's father to a federal appeals court. Bush carried the precincts that comprise the district with more than 64 percent two years ago and plans a campaign visit Tuesday in Jackson, the capital.
Republicans say polling completed in the wake of WorldCom's collapse found Pickering, 38, with support from over 50 percent of the voters, and gave him a lead of roughly 20 percentage points.
Hoping to make up ground, Shows is expected to begin television advertising on Monday, even though it means dipping early into a campaign treasury far smaller than his rival's.
Yet if WorldCom and other corporate scandals are going to have an impact, it could well be in this district where employees of the Clinton-based bankrupt telecommunications company have lost jobs, savings and retirement funds.
According to the Center For Responsive Politics, Pickering took $82,000 in donations from WorldCom executives and employees in recent years, more than anyone else in Congress.
Shows took $6,000 and has announced plans to put it in a fund for victims of the corporate collapse.
In an exchange that captures the campaign, he challenges Pickering to ``Give it back'' out of empathy for those who have been hurt.
Pickering parries Shows' populist jab with a conservative's counterpunch.
``I've been surprised that Ronnie would want to make campaign contributions an issue,'' he says. To thunderous boos from the crowd, he adds of his rival, ``He took $5,000 from Hillary Clinton, $1,000 from Al Gore'' and more from the Democratic leaders of Congress.
As in races elsewhere, trade, prescription drugs and Social Security all figure prominently in the debate. Shows attacks Pickering's votes as anti-worker and pro-pharmaceutical industry and says his rival supports privatizing Social Security.
In a response taken straight from the national Republican playbook, Pickering says, ``I oppose privatization,'' and pledges that in the debate Bush wants to have next year over Social Security, no benefit will ever be cut.
Purely local concerns count for much, and seemingly to Pickering's advantage.
After a racially charged redrawing of political lines, the district's population wound up 30 percent black, nearly 10 percentage points less than a map backed by Shows and the Democrats.
Also, Pickering is trying to turn his father's lost confirmation battle to his advantage.
The defeat was engineered by ``the national Democratic party leadership in Washington,'' he says. He said his father was rejected ``because he's a man of Christian conviction, because he's been a leader for the Mississippi Baptists because he's pro-life, because he's from Mississippi.''
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