Change on the Horizon

Howard Dean said that presidential hopeful Barack Obama has a chance to win Mississippi.

by Bryan Doyle
July 23, 2008

Barack Obama can win Mississippi for the Democratic Party. A laughable statement in political circles as recently as last year, this was the message Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean delivered during a Friday, July 18, address at Tougaloo College with a seriousness and fervor reminiscent of his 2004 presidential campaign.

“The South has a changed a lot in the past 40 years,” he told the crowd of nearly 200 at the Kroger Gymnasium. “What we want people to know is that not only has the South changed, but the Democratic Party has changed.”

Dean, whose visit was part of a bus tour across the South, outlined a decentralized voter registration campaign calling for participants to knock on 25 of their neighbors’ doors three times for the presumptive Democratic nominee, and then convince two people to do the same.

The campaign, which Dean said stresses a stronger commitment to local leaders rather than to outsiders from Washington, reflects the grassroots commitment to community organizing that has defined the Obama campaign throughout the past year and a half.

“It ain’t going to happen unless you do it,” he said, pointing at the crowd.

Dean’s visit comes at a time of momentum for the Mississippi Democratic Party. After Gov. Haley Barbour appointed Roger Wicker on Dec. 31 of last year to fill the Senate seat vacated by Trent Lott, social conservative Democrat Travis Childers won Wicker’s First Congressional District in a special May election, a seat Wicker had held as a Republican for 14 years. Now, former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove is contesting Wicker in his campaign to keep his new Senate seat for a full term in November.

Dean joined many Democratic leaders and supporters by touting Childers’ victory as proof that the state is ready to elect the first Democratic nominee for president since the nation’s bicentennial.

Aaron Gardner, Mississippi field director for the Obama campaign, said he believes the Democratic Party will have the resources to win in Mississippi in November.

After Dean’s speech, Gardner said the campaign had three full-time staffers on the payroll. By Monday, Gardner told the Jackson Free Press that he had hired a fourth.

He said he expects “lots more” support in the months after the Jackson office opens on 733 N. State Street, though he would not give specific numbers.

Dean’s bus tour across the South is part of a wider initiative by the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party to contest presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in G.O.P. strongholds like Mississippi, which has not voted for a Democrat in the general election since state Georgia native and then-Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter ran in 1976.

The overall campaign to broaden Obama’s support in Republican centers is not exclusive to the South. Obama has made several campaign stops to traditionally Republican-supporting western states like Montana and North Dakota. But the southern campaign is unique in that Democratic chances rest on the mobilization of the significant black populace in the region. This support helped fuel double-digit primary victories for Obama in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Obama won Mississippi by 24 percentage points.

Yet with all the “rah rah” of the occasion and the back-patting over recent Democratic advances in the state and elsewhere, Dean tempered his speech with the recognition that, at best, turning Mississippi in 2008 would be an “uphill climb.”

In stressing the centrality of a successful statewide registration program to a Democratic victory, Dean said the party had “no chance” of winning without the votes of 100,000 newly registered Mississippi voters.

“He was realistic, I think,” said LaQuanda Fields, assistant to the president at Tougaloo College, who attended Dean’s address. “It was clear that they have a lot riding on the registration program.”

Dean, who throughout his speech stressed what he said were similarities in Democratic and southern values, including the Biblical notion of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” tried to localize the idea of the new Democratic strategy by comparing his political party to two of Mississippi’s beloved perennial collegiate football losers in recent years.

“You know what happens when Mississippi State or Ole Miss takes the football field. They might win, and they might not. But I can tell you what happens when they don’t show up on the football field. They are definitely going to lose. We are done not showing up at the state of Mississippi,” he said.

 
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