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Let me make it clear. Some of the best people I know are from Mississippi— , great chefs, and people who run fabulous independent bookstores. Archie Manning is simply the nicest man I ever have met, anywhere, under any circumstances. Most of the music I love best is from Mississippi, and all of the music I love best is influenced by music from Mississippi. Medgar Evers believed in Mississippi even though it cost him his life. Bob Moses went to Mississippi to register voters, lived through the worst violence of which American apartheid was capable, and still started his remarkable Algebra Project in Jackson. Mississippi progressives keep on keeping on against the worst undying headwinds in American politics. And they are brave and true.

I did not envy them Monday because the president* was coming down to Mississippi to campaign for Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Varina Davis wannabe, a glitchy prototype from Stepford that never made it into production, and an unreconstructed Confederate cosplay artist.

This combination of raw materials had the potential to produce a grotesque goat-roping even by the president*'s standards. It was a week in which both Hyde-Smith's inbred bigotry and the president*'s volatile combination of racism and xenophobia collided with each other clangorously in the national media. (Here, for example, is Hyde-Smith, hilariously beating feet away from MSNBC's Vaughn Hillyard. I presume the staffer who locked the car door has been fired by now.) She is still favored to beat Democratic candidate Mike Espy, an African American and a Clinton-era retread who has done a decent job of staying out of the way while Hyde-Smith's CSA masquerade played itself out over the past few weeks.

Al Drago Getty Images

The campaign has developed into a test of character for Mississippi voters. Hyde-Smith says so many of the quiet parts out loud that it doesn't leave anyone any place to hide. One recalls the summation given by Hinds County Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter to the jury that finally convicted Byron De La Beckwith of murdering Medgar Evers, 30 years after the crime had been committed.

"It's right, it's just, and Lord knows it's just about time...Is it ever too late to do the right thing?″

Cindy Hyde-Smith is a woman who has benefitted from white supremacy, who has gloried in white supremacy, and who is fully expecting that white supremacy will carry her into a full term in the United States Senate, where she will be an undistinguished but reliable vote for all the white-supremacist measures, and all the white supremacist judges that will rule on them, that will come to her from this administration. And now the president* came down to mix the toxic icing from the old poisoned recipe. Tuesday's election is one of history's altar calls. God alone knows what will come of it.





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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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