Ellington

Every year at the Neshoba County Fair, candidates bring in college students to do their dirty work. They did it back when I was head of "Students for Stennis" at Mississippi State—when, as it happens, Haley Barbour ran against him. We all stuck stickers all over us, screamed and yelled for our candidates, and jockeyed to get our candidate signs in front of the cameras—and in front of the opponent's signs.

The work has gotten a little dirtier of late, though. Last year at Mississippi's Giant Houseparty, which is oft-credited as the must-stop political stop of the season (hey: Reagan came!), young African-American women, reportedly hired by the GOP, walked around with homemade signs with Democrat Ronnie Shows' face next to that of the devils themselves, Hillary Clinton and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state's only black and openly liberal congressman. "It's just racist," I heard one of the Democrats in the crowd that day mutter. "They're playing to people's worst instincts." Racist or not, it did seem, at the very least, a bit off-message.

This year, I saw no black faces on homemade signs, but the hand-lettered signs were there (perhaps to send the message that the campaign couldn't possibly have been behind them). My favorite was a white poster lettered with "Ronnie Loves Hillary" (with a picture of a heart as the verb) that a petite, young Asian-American college student was carrying. As the media gaggle (surreally) followed Musgrove around the square after his speech as he shook hands, the young woman kept trying to weasel the sign up in front of the Musgrove signs that provided his media backdrop. Musgrove students would elbow her and her sign away, and she'd pop back up in another opening. I watched this game for a few minutes from the rear of the gaggle—all the time watching the "Rebels for Barbour" sticker stuck to her plastic shorts bob along with her—and then decided to approach her.

"Can I talk to you?" She suddenly looked very nervous, quickly shaking her head no. "Who do you work for?" She answered through clenched teeth: "Haley Barbour. I'm an intern." She darted away as another fellow intern approached. In one hand, she carried a homemade church fan with a photocopied picture of Bill Clinton on one side and Ronnie Musgrove on another.

Ironically, though, it was the Barbour-Clinton connection that made headlines that day. Both Musgrove and GOP challenger Mitch Tyner accused Barbour of working for Mexico to help the country lure jobs out of Mississippi as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

That afternoon, Barbour denied having worked to help get NAFTA passed, saying the suggestion was "silly." The next day, though, Musgrove's office e-mailed around a quote in USA Today from Barbour in 1993. "We support NAFTA because it's good policy," he had told the newspaper then. "It isn't often that Bill Clinton offers a good policy that we can help him with." Musgrove also released a copy of a letter on the letterhead of Barbour's lobbying firm to the Mexican ambassabor in 2001 saying that Barbour would head the team on NAFTA implementation.

Maybe the Barbour-Clinton church fan is still on the interns' drawing table.