Jackson Free Press

1. What happened to Thad Cochran's black-vote turnout machine?

After the incumbent made it into a runoff against state Sen. Chris McDaniel, Cochran's campaign launched an all-out blitz aimed at getting African Americans who did not participate in the Democratic primary to vote in the GOP runoff. It worked then. But with the exception of a poorly attended rally in downtown Jackson and some ads in the Mississippi Link, Cochran isn't going as hard for blacks to show up at the polls today. Makes you go hmmmmm.

1. What was Travis Childers thinking?

When he talked at the Neshoba County fair this summer about raising the minimum wage, equal pay for women and expanding health-care access, I thought those were solid populist issues that could appeal to traditional Democratic voters—blacks, women and young folks—as well as blue-collar whites. All he really needed to do was to go around the state hammering those three talking points into the heads of sensible people who'd tuned out the Cochran-McDaniel legal shenanigans. Childers didn't even need much money to do that. And as a successful businessman, could have driven around the state on his dime. Instead, he remained silent; his campaign ignored interview requests from reporters. And when it became clear that his opponent would be Cochran, all Childers wanted to do was talk about debates, which almost never works.

1. Could there be a tea party 'Bradley Effect'?

When Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, ran for governor of California in the 1980s, some polling organizations projected that he would win. After he lost, narrowly, the term "Bradley effect" came to describe where people tell polltakers they will support a minority candidate because it seems politically correct, but then vote for the white candidate in the booth. A lot of McDaniel supporters claims they won't vote for Cochran under any circumstance and are looking at Childers as viable alternative. I wonder, though, if we'll see some version of the Bradley Effect, where tea-partiers vote for the Republican Cochran, but tell people they cast a protest vote for Childers or another candidate.

1. Why is Chuck C. Johnson so quiet?

Remember when Johnson, a California-based blogger, blew into Mississippi and got the whole state all a-twitter during the Republican Senate primary? Remember how local media spent weeks chasing anti-Cochran "stories" that Johnson broke on his website. Apparently, Johnson got bored with us and headed up to Ferguson, Mo., to write about the protests surrounding the shooting death of 18-year-old Mike Brown. After that, he got really interested in Ebola. So interested in fact that he was booted from Twitter for publishing the home address of a nurse who had worked with an Ebola patient. Considering his heavy involvement—some might even say influence—in #mssen, it's a mystery why has yet to weigh in McDaniel's once-and-for-all defeat at the Mississippi Supreme Court.

1. Maybe Blacks should just vote in GOP primaries from now on

If Thad Cochran returns …

What Rev. Joseph Dyer has done in his column published in The Clarion-Ledger today is suggest that white women, who he stresses are inherently more privileged, should have more rights than women of color. His column is called "Let's keep abortions safe, legal for white women," and he calls this proposal a "compromise."

"This compromise tells the children of black women that they are worthy, and desirable, and have been from the moment of their conception ... My compromise means that they will always know that their lives were protected, not just by their mother, but also by the law of the land," Dyer, pastor at St. Michael Parish in Forest, Miss., writes.

Leaving the option of abortion only up to white women, he says, tells white children "that the larger society was iffy about their value and worth at that time in their vulnerable lives."

He acknowledges that his "compromise" is horrible and racists, "but isn't that what compromise means, putting up with the disgusting to bring the nice a little closer?"

I assume the "nice a little closer" Dyer is referring to is the abolition of abortion for women of color. Only, Dyer seems oblivious to the fact that abortion is currently a right of all women in every state in the country (despite the fact that it is quickly being diminished by anti-abortion activist attempts).

To say that abortion should only be legal for white women is to say that abortion should be illegal for black women, which would only strengthen systematic oppression and racism against them. To "keep abortion safe, legal for (only) white women" is to make abortion dangerous for women of color.

Dyer says that his compromise will tell black children they are worthy, but instead it tells black women that they are not worthy of choosing when to become a mother and strips them of their autonomy.