Last week’s appearances by Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and Attorney General Jim Hood at the Neshoba County Fair were being billed as a preview of next year’s governor’s race in Mississippi.
The two didn’t disappoint.They laid out, in the course of about 10 minutes each, what voters can expect in 2019 if Reeves is the Republican nominee and Hood the Democratic one.
Reeves will wrap himself up in President Donald Trump, who is popular in these parts, especially among white conservatives, while trying to chain Hood to the national Democratic Party, which isn’t.
Hood will say Reeves is a self-serving autocrat who is taking Mississippi down the tubes with tax cuts for the wealthy while letting roads crumble, schools and hospitals suffer, and the sick die for lack of adequate health care.
Such competing caricatures may be all either one thinks will resonate with voters. Let’s hope not, because what Mississippi really faces is an essential question of whether Reeves’ Republican Party — which dominates every level of state government today — is on the right track in trying to foster prosperity to this long-impoverished state, or whether it is digging the hole deeper for all but a select few.
There are competing statistics for making the case of either side. Republicans point to the low unemployment rate, which is running about half of what it was at the beginning of the decade. Their critics ask, however, If a lower unemployment rate is an accurate gauge of good times, how come the state economy and workers’ wages remain stagnant, and population growth is nil?
Yes, the national economy is humming along, but it has not filtered down to Mississippi. When is the economic boom that Reeves keeps promising will come as a result of the huge tax cut Republicans pushed through the Legislature in 2016 going to materialize?
Republican orthodoxy — on taxes, on infrastructure spending, on Medicaid expansion — needs to be challenged. There are few within the GOP leadership willing to do it openly. Hood may be the only Democrat who has enough of a bipartisan appeal to offer a credible alternative. He might not be able to beat Reeves, but he would make him sweat
