Way Down Yonder

I'm always harping to folks outside of the South (particularly progressive folks) about the third-world conditions the rural poor live in here in Mississippi. I've also been trying to figure out exactly why the GOP put so much time, money, and effort into getting Haley Barbour (former RNC chairman and fat-cat lobbyist extraordinaire) into the Governor's mansion in what is arguably one of the poorest and already most conservative states. I've had one main theory.

Mississippi consistently ranks in the bottom two or three states in the Union on the success rate of almost every conceivable publicly-funded front. Education, health care, etc.. Given that the state is so solidly Republican (in theory), might it not prove a fertile testing ground for the further expansion of the Goldwater-conservative reversal of all public programs? Given the massive cuts Barbour has pushed through in the (already gasping) Mississippi schools budget, I've thought we could be on the verge of a test-run in eliminating public education. After all, the schools here always fare so poorly anyway. Why not?

We've also seen Barbour push through deep cuts in public health care. Today, Bob Herbert takes him to task in the Op-Ed pages of the NYT.

If you want to see "compassionate" conservatism in action, take a look at Mississippi, a state that is solidly in the red category (strong for Bush) and committed to its long tradition of keeping the poor and the unfortunate in as ragged and miserable a condition as possible.

How's this for compassion? Mississippi has approved the deepest cut in Medicaid eligibility for senior citizens and the disabled that has ever been approved anywhere in the U.S.

The new policy will end Medicaid eligibility for some 65,000 low-income senior citizens and people with severe disabilities — people like Traci Alsup, a 36-year-old mother of three who was left a quadriplegic after a car accident.

The cut in eligibility for seniors and the disabled was the most dramatic component of a stunning rollback of services in Mississippi's Medicaid program. The rollback was initiated by the Republican-controlled State Senate and Mississippi's new governor, Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the national Republican Party. When he signed the new law on May 26, Mr. Barbour complained about taxpayers having to "pay for free health care for people who can work and take care of themselves and just choose not to."

The governor is free to characterize the victims of the cuts as deadbeats if he wants to. Others have described them as patients suffering from diseases like cerebral palsy and Alzheimer's, and people incapacitated by diabetes or heart disease or various forms of paralysis, and individuals struggling with the agony of schizophrenia or other forms of serious mental illness.

The gap between the haves and have-nots is perhaps nowhere as striking as here in Mississippi, where the poorest poor live in conditions most Americans would not believe still exist in this country. That the GOP's man in Jackson has decided to steal baldly from those that have so little, and to characterize them in this way, is no surprise, however morally disturbing it may be. For what it's worth, though Barbour represents the absolute worst of Mississippi, he also represents a good segment of the population, those who have convinced themselves that this abject poverty is no longer a truth here in this land of cavernous homes and private planes. To them, the Delta is not the Third-World, but rather fertile land from which springs forth Casinos, growth, and opportunity.