"Now they tell us, 'It's time for a change,'" he said, his deeply grooved face settling into a sneer. "'Oh, we're just mad,' they say. Well, that'd be like trading Peyton Manning because you got mad at the city of Denver." One wonders whether Bryant watched the last Super Bowl, in which an aging Manning performed abysmally and the Broncos were trounced by the young, dynamic Seattle Seahawks.

Cochran's speech was not so fiery. He shuffled onto the stage and spoke for two and a half minutes to the group of about 100 local people, many of them hospital workers taking a morning break. "Standing out here, I couldn't help but think back to my first days in elected politics," he mused, recalling his old friend Sonny Montgomery, a Democratic member of Congress who has been dead for eight years.

I followed Cochran from the square to a local diner, Jean's Restaurant, where patrons swiveled away from plastic plates of boiled okra and corn fritters to shake his hand. On the wall were two framed photographs of Chris McDaniel. The restaurant's owner, Diane Trammell, told me McDaniel had visited twice and stayed for an hour each time. "I don't recall the last time I seen Thad," she said. She'd always voted for Cochran in the past, but now she wasn't sure.

Cochran didn't pose for any pictures during his brief sweep. As he made his way toward the exit, the senator held out his hand to me. I had met and interviewed him less than half an hour before.

"Hello, how are you doing?" he said with a kindly smile. "I'm Thad Cochran."

* * *

If Cochran embodies everything the Tea Party is against—the out-of-touch, go-along-to-get-along, big-spending Washington insider—his opponent is nearly as good an exemplar of the Tea Party. A lawyer and two-term state senator from a part of the state that was once a haven for Civil War deserters, McDaniel is prone to portentous, fire-and-brimstone declarations, often involving the Constitution. If elected, he says he will follow in the footsteps of senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah.

The national right-wing groups whose mission is to purify the GOP of heresy have rallied behind McDaniel. The Senate Conservatives Fund, the Club for Growth, the Tea Party Patriots, and numerous other groups have spent more than $4.5 million on his behalf. Over the weekend, Sarah Palin dropped by McDaniel's hometown of Ellisville for a raucous rally where she made the case for rejecting the "old guard."

McDaniel, however, routinely casts his mission not as a break with the past but as a bulwark against a frightening future. "Millions in this country feel like strangers in this land," he says. "An older America is passing away. A newer America is rising to take its place. We recoil from that culture. It’s foreign to us. It’s offensive to us." This is a remarkably frank declaration of the vision of the Tea Party embraced by liberal social scientists: an expression, above all, of old white people's anxieties at the prospect of an urbanizing, liberalizing, diversifying America.